I recently ran into a situation where I needed to determine if a view controller was in a form sheet, or pushed onto a navigation stack. A pattern I use for things like Settings in a universal app is to push the Settings view controller onto the stack, when on the iPhone, and wrap it […]
I have always wanted to write more. Every time I get the itch to write something substantial, there is a pattern that plays out. The first thing I do is think “I need to find a great app to write in†and get totally sidelined by downloading and trying out writing apps. This makes no […]
Translucent navigation bars are cool. The content that scrolls up off the visible area alters the look of the navigation bar. But they do introduce some complexity, and sometimes you just don’t need it, because your content doesn’t scroll. So let’s say you’ve got an app that has some content that does scroll, like a […]
Listening to a recent episode of The Talk Show, John Gruber and Jason Snell were talking about advertising.  John’s talked about this before, about the mess that is web advertising these days, and Jason gave some great insider perspective, as a long-time MacWorld editor. Setting aside whether ads are good or bad, the web today […]
Now that Apple Music is out, and people are seeing how well the curation works, I’ve seen people ask about curation in the App Store. Seems to me Apple is already doing this, and has been for a long time Go look at the App Store.  What do you see?  Almost all of the iTunes […]
Apple Music is a big change. No matter what you used for music previously, Apple Music is different. It’s an exciting service, and it’s doing a great job of getting me back into music. But it’s also confusing. I’ve spent a lot of time with Apple Music lately, and I wanted to share some things […]
Not every app should support the watch, but when the Apple Watch was announced, the one use case that immediately seemed obvious to me was quick access to a grocery list. I built this feature for MealPlan, putting a good amount of work into getting it to stay in sync with the main iPhone app, […]
It’s important to do your homework, and pay attention to what your furnace installer is doing. That’s the takeaway from my recent furnace replacement and Nest installation. Here are some details that you may find helpful. My furnace died on a very cold day, so I called my local furnace repair company. They’re great; they’ve […]
I don’t live way out in the boonies somewhere; I’m 5 minutes from a Starbucks.  I have LTE at home.  But the best level of Internet services available where I live is DSL, 6mbps down, 800kbps up.  This means I can upload at about 80k/second. For all you kids with your DOCSIS or VDSL or […]
Since iOS and UIKit, Apple has produced three products with three new UI toolkits:  Apple TV, CarPlay, and WatchKit. In all three instances, the architecture they’ve chosen is one where the UI is essentially a runtime. There’s a reason that all Apple TV apps look the same, and that’s because the “app†just provides data […]