Category Archive for ‘Recipes’

Can you Smell the iBeacon?

Nov 19, 2013

iBeacons are one of the hot new topics introduced with iOS 7, though I have not seen any actual real life use case for it.

Last week I received my Developer Preview Kit from Estimote and also I have begun to research iBeacons for inclusion in the book I am currently working on. Here are my findings.

There are two words that you should know to understand the difference between the two modes of operation:

Monitoring – this refers to a low-power region-monitoring, you get didEnterRegion: and didExitRegion: delegate messages
Ranging – this means a higher-power activity where you get the signal strength from individual iBeacons and can estimate distance to them from this

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For version 0.2.0 of DTMarkdownParser I needed an array that would allow me to look up the string range for individual lines of a string. My initial approach was to simple use the provided method of NSValue to wrap an NSRange in it. The problem with this approach is that as the number of ranges in the array grows so does the time needed to find a range at a higher index.

Jan Weiß of Geheimwerk suggested to replace this approach with one based on C memory allocation and searching functions. This required me to brush up on my dynamic C-array allocation skills which had become somewhat rusty from only using Objective-C objects for everything. The techniques I’ll be discussing in this blog might be of great value to you, too, if you ever find yourself needing to quickly find a scalar value (i.e. a number or struct) in a dynamically sizing array.

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Blurring Views on Mac

Oct 24, 2013

“Frosted Glass” abounds on iOS 7 and this new look is the new “Corinthian Leather”. Apple has often used design ideas from their mobile OS and let them inform UI design on OS X. This begs the question: where is frosted glass on Mac?

Mac developer Raffael Hannemann offered to do a guest tutorial for Cocoanetics.com demonstrating how to achieve the same view blurring effect on Mac, where you are much less constrained by the GPU performance. On Mac the necessary ingredients for view blurring are readily available.

On iOS Apple kept the necessary APIs for blurring private for the time being because of a severe performance problem that goes hand in hand with live Gaussian blurring. Raffel’s blog post after the break.

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Xcode Coverage

Oct 01, 2013

Code Coverage is described on Wikipedia as:

… a measure used to describe the degree to which the source code of a program is tested by a particular test suite. A program with high code coverage has been more thoroughly tested and has a lower chance of containing software bugs than a program with low code coverage.

Less bugs? Yes, please!

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Travis CI For Pull Request Validation

Aug 31, 2013

If you have an project that is accepting code contributions then you will want to make sure that those well-meaning additions don’t break existing functionality. Services like GitHub allow you to review such pull requests via their colored diffs or even give instructions as to how to manually pull the commits into a local branch for evaluating this.

But there is a limit that is quickly being reached if you need to check all those pull requests manually. Even worse, this is a mundane task, usually trying out if the targets build and running the unit tests. Repetitive tasks like this are boring and thus nobody can be faulted for starting to neglect them.

In this blog post I will explain how to set up Travis-CI to have all pull requests be automatically checked for you. You will know for each pull request if merging it into your develop branch would break the build or unit tested functionality.

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Variable-Sized Items in UICollectionView

Aug 30, 2013

UICollectionView was added last year with iOS 6 and to this date I had no real chance to get acquainted with it since most of my apps were still supporting iOS 5. Doing a fresh app only supporting the latest iOS version finally allowed me to dig into it and share the journey with you.

The special scenario we want to look at today is how we could configure variable-sized collection view cells for items like tags. We want to have the cells adjust their size automatically based on the tag string and ideally we don’t want to have to write any layout code for determine the needed sizes.

Please forgive if the following has a few places where I stumbled. It is these temporary snags that I believe you learn from the most, so I left them in the final article.

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Block-Based Logging Replacement for NSLog

Aug 06, 2013

It became apparent that we should have a standard method for logging in our frameworks. Some of use are happily using Cocoa Lumberjack in product apps, but not everybody might share this test. So there was a need to have some sort of looking hooks in our shared library code. This would allow everybody to hook up his own favorite logging framework or simply use NSLog.

In this blog post I am explaining the rationale behind DTLog, new in DTFoundation as of version 1.5.1.

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Monitoring a Folder with GCD

Aug 05, 2013

There is no notification to be gotten if the user adds or removes files to your app’s documents folder. The only way to update your list of files in that case is to monitor the folder for changes. There are several different approaches to achieve this, the traditional one being the File System Events API.

But since iOS 4 – together with GCD – Apple added a simpler method for monitoring a vnode, dispatch sources.

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Talking to Amazon Web Services

Jul 14, 2013

I have several boxes of books that I want to create a list of. I have the technology down to scan the book bar codes rapidly. But how could I get the book titles for my inventory?

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a collection of Amazon’s web APIs. Their Product Advertising API offers to search for books by ISBN and so I had to dig into their documentation to figure out how to query their API.

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Taking Stackshots

Jul 13, 2013

You know how to take screenshots on your iOS device and that is quite useful when filing bug reports because as they say “a picture is worth a thousand words”. But there are situations – happened to me recently – when an app is non-responsive and a screen shot wouldn’t really tell much of a story.

Especially when dealing with BETA software it is useful to also commit to memory how to take stackshots.

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