Archive for the 'Development' Category

MealPlan Sync with Ensembles

Wednesday, March 19th, 2014

MealPlan is a meal and grocery planning app that, up until recently, was only available on the iPad. I wanted to bring it to the iPhone, but I had to implement sync first. I started with iCloud Core Data Sync from Apple, back before iOS 7, and ran into nothing but troubles. It was seriously […]

Not Crashing, Hanging

Wednesday, July 18th, 2012

I posted previously about the frustrating experience of having an app in the app store crashing and having no way to find out why. Then I posted about HockeyApp and an apparent happy ending. My apps aren’t crashing and everyone should be happy, right? Not so fast. Resume Designer hangs for some users when they […]

Avoid Premature Localization

Saturday, April 21st, 2012

Localization is one of the signs of a mature software product. I did a bit of research into whether localizing an app translates into increased sales, and in my non-scientific review of blog posts and forum posts from developers discussing the issue, the conclusion I came to is that localization doesn’t make that much sense […]

Building a Dynamic UIActionSheet

Saturday, December 3rd, 2011

Most of the examples I see for UIActionSheet (the iOS pop-up menu) show static choices and checking for which one was picked by using constant values. That’s not going to work if your menu needs to be dynamic. For example, if you want to have an option to Email or Print an item, you might […]

UITableView, Multi Select and Swipe To Delete

Tuesday, November 29th, 2011

I was having a problem recently with a UITableView, where the swipe-to-delete gesture wasn’t working. The documentation is pretty clear that your table will get the swipe to delete behaviour if you implement the [cci]tableView:commitEditingStyle:forRowAtIndexPath:[/cci] method in your [cci]UITableViewDataSource[/cci] delegate. So, in other words, implementing this one method in your data source should be enough […]

MealPlan for the PlayBook

Wednesday, November 9th, 2011

I like writing software to scratch a personal itch, and answering the “what’s for dinner” question has always been something I figured computers could help with. I had a PlayBook, development tools, and a desire for an app that would make it easy to quickly put together a plan for the meals for the week. […]

SmugMug Uploader Take 2

Wednesday, March 11th, 2009

I posted my AIR-based SmugMug Uploader about a year ago, and back then, I had rolled my own version of a SmugMug API client. Then I found the as3smugmuglib project on Google Code. I changed the app to work with that API instead of my own code. Because I used Cairngorm when I built the […]

Bandwidth Donation Protocol

Tuesday, December 30th, 2008

Bandwidth is both expensive and cheap. It’s cheap at a lot of hosts and for a lot of consumers, because providers expect we’re not going to use what we’re allocated, and yet expensive when purchased in bulk, where the assumption must be that it will all be used. Every time I hear about how expensive […]

Outsourcing Commenting

Saturday, November 15th, 2008

There’s a service called Disqus that provides hosted commenting for your blog or website. My Ottawa Events site was recently hit by a deluge of spam – so much so that I had to disable commenting completely. I discovered Discus through Dave Winer’s blog, and it seems like it’s worth a shot, so I’ve enabled […]

Disable (and Document) Menu Items

Tuesday, July 1st, 2008

Joel posted a short article: Don’t Hide or Disable Menu Items. I think it’s bad advice. Consider Paste or Undo. If you click the Edit menu, you can tell from the enabled state of the Paste item whether or not there’s something on the clipboard that can be pasted. Same with Undo. If Save is […]