Like many of you, I’ve recently starting coming to terms with automatic reference counting (ARC) in Objective-C. For the most part, it’s gone remarkably smoothly. The only hard part is remembering to not type autorelease! ARC lets us get rid of the retain/release pairs in our code. But can you spot the bug in the [...]
I think we can all agree that iTunes is in need of a major overhaul. So why isn’t it happening? Apple has shown no fear of rethinking and innovating with the user interfaces that manage our own personal data. Both the iMovie and iPhoto apps are great examples of this: they’ve gotten much simpler to [...]
If you follow me on Twitter, you’re probably aware of a really nasty problem I encountered with versioned Core Data models. Suffice it to say that was two days of hell caused by a single Fetch Request in a .xcdatamodeld file. The irony of it all is that I no longer use Fetch Requests this [...]
Many of us rely on VMware Fusion for testing our products both on older and newer versions of Mac OS X. Your development machine may be running Lion, but it’s incredibly handy to run both Snow Leopard and Mountain Lion on the same machine. With the recent release of Mountain Lion DP2 some problems cropped [...]
The recent release of xScope 3.0 is our first product to use the new application sandbox that will soon become a requirement for submission to the Mac App Store. I’d like to share some experiences and advice on how to use it in your own products. First off, Ivan Krstić and the rest of the [...]
A lot of people I know and respect have been commenting on problems associated with the iPhone mute switch: John Gruber – On the Behavior of the iPhone Mute Switch Andy Ihnatko – Unmuting on The Mute Question Marco Arment – Designing “Mute” Guy English – Mute This Both sides of the argument have valid [...]
The bank we use for our business account recently mandated the use of a product called Trusteer Rapport while accessing our information online. Although Mac OS X doesn’t have any problems with “increasingly sophisticated malware in the online environment”, I do need to periodically check our accounts and transactions so I proceeded with the installation. [...]
I’m old enough to remember a time before the Internet. I know what it’s like to develop software both with and without a worldwide network. Little has changed with the process of software development since the 1980′s. Of course there have been improvements in our tools and techniques, but the basic act of creating software [...]
Dear Steve, I’m one of the developers that is affected by the Lodsys patent infringement claim. I’m writing not to beg for your support, but rather to give you a better idea of how this legal action affects the average iOS developer. We’re a small company. We have 12 employees that have created 14 products [...]
When we released Chameleon at the end of last month, we thought we’d try something new to raise funds for the project. Selling T-shirts and stock icons seemed like a pretty good way. Boy, were we wrong. Since March 22nd, we’ve sold 17 shirts. If you do the math, that will pay for less than [...]