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Back on Mac – OS X Tutorial for iOS Developers

Sep 19, 2012

I’ve been programming for the iOS platform ever since this is possible, since the iPhone 3G with iPhone OS 2.0 was released by Apple in Summer 2008. For all this time I had a healthy respect about programming for Mac. More precisely: Horror.

If you dig into it you can only applaud Apple for not having tried to craft touch screen and energy optimization stuff onto AppKit, but chose to go the forked OS route. Being a seasoned iOS developer you will find yourself often cursing about how complicated certain activities seem.

Having said that you also see the positive influence of iOS on AppKit all around. Now that Apple deprecated Garbage Collection and you are already well used to programming under the ARC paradigm you find yourself writing exactly the same code for both platforms more often than not.

This will be the first in a series of tutorials where I am sharing my experiences in diving into AppKit. Please let me know if this is in fact interesting to you by sharing and Flattr’ing it.

2 Comments

Retina Iconset Trouble

Sep 13, 2012

When I was done with QA on Linguan 1.1.2 I wanted to submit it for review. But when I tried the validation step in Xcode halted me. It complained that I didn’t have a 512×512@2x icon. Then it dawned on me: Retina Macs.

So you have to imagine me, all excited about being able to submit this, but unable to do so. The icons for Linguan were all contained in an icns and I was stumped … but only for a moment. With help from David Smith I was able to prepare an iconset, the best current method for preparing the multiple resolutions of icons for Mac apps.

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iPhone 5 Keynote Event

Sep 12, 2012

We just witnessed the iPhone 5 launch …almost live … at the Runtastic HQ where there was a Cocoahead special event. Let’s summarize what it means for us developers.

Tim Cook called iOS 6 and iPhone 5 the “biggest thing to happen to the iPhone since iCloud”.

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Knowing that File Protection Works

Sep 07, 2012

In one of our business-specific apps we wanted to activate File Protection. But how do you know if its turned on and actually doing its job?

We even spent a tech incident (of two you get from free every year) to inquire how we could be certain if the feature is actually working. Though unfortunately Apple did not have any answer for us because there is no way to actually test this with “legal” means.

Our first thought had been to copy the app documents to the desktop via Xcode organizer. But of course you can only do this while the iDevice is unlocked and thus even file-protected files come across normally.

1 Comment

Summertime 1.2.0

Sep 06, 2012

Our Summertime is a handy little tool that shows you when the next DST switch is in your local time zone. The newest version brings these improvements:

Fixed: Cannot search for timezones that have a space.
Fixed: Some missing Time Zone localizations
Fixed: Text alignment issues with longer count down durations or Time Zone names
Fixed: Time Zone names not getting updated if system language was changed
Fixed: Broken Reminder function
Changed: first page is now always the local time zone
Improved: Scrolling Performance in Timezone selector

There were some other “crufty” things that we addressed behind the scenes. The project was converted to ARC and the import process for localized timezone names was parallel-ized to achieve the much improved scrolling performance.

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Radar: Scroll Direction setting linked for Mouse and Trackpad

Sep 05, 2012

It is understandable to have this ominous “Natural Scrolling” setting for trackpads. And that there is a separate such setting for mice. But I don’t understand why Apple would like these two settings, because somebody working on a laptop might want to use the normal way to scroll with his mouse’s scroll while while using the “natural” setting for his trackpad.

Filed as Radar #12236447 and cross-posted on OpenRadar.

Updated March 6th, 2013: “Works as Intended”

1 Comment

App Review Advice for YouTube v2

Aug 31, 2012

I googled “Clint Eastwood Invisible Obama” because I was wondering why suddenly everybody is posting pictures of chairs with invisible presidents in them, hash tag #eastwooding. Of course there already was a video of the 10-minute speech to be found on YouTube, so I watched that.

The video quality bad, really bad, 360p kind of bad. I was watching it on my iPad 3 where I still sport iOS 5. This is my comfortable consumption device and where would consumption be without a YouTube client. You know, iOS 6 doesn’t have one any more. I am not referring to Mr. Eastwoods remarks when I am calling the experience painful.

YouTube is going to great lengths to prevent people from getting at the h.264 videos they are specifically preparing for iOS devices. Only the YouTube app as well as the MPMoviePlayerController’s that webviews overlay to fake embedded video know how to request the actual video data from Google’s servers. This video stream is then served as a progressive download.

The video was stalling every 3-5 minutes and frantically hacking at the play button would not have made any difference. Only if I moved the slider into the future, waited until the new position was showing and then moving it back to where it had stopped was I able to continue viewing.

6 Comments

Telling a Tale … Where Download-Code Sucks

Aug 30, 2012

I’ll be the first to admit that I love what Telltale Games have done to the long ago diseased adventure game genre. I played the Monkey Island Games via Steam, got Wallace & Grommit even though I don’t even possess a PC (unfortunately not available for Mac) and I loved the first episode of “The Walking Dead” on my iPad.

A mere 14 hours ago Telltale released the second episode for iOS but it turns out that their episode downloading code is utter crap. Much to my frustration because I am trying to get this episode for playing for around 10 hours now. It is quarter to 11 pm and I have reached a point where I need to vent my chagrin in a blog post.

If only to tell a tale how NOT to construct code that downloads many hundreds of megabytes.

3 Comments

Great Apple Support

Aug 27, 2012

I have a collection of all iOS ever made, all iPhones, all iPod Touches, of course the iPads. I call it “my museum”. Though only the oldest are actually on display since the newer one are all in use. Of the iPhone 4S I even have 3 in active use, though when all my users will have moved on, I’ll sell away all but one to also take its honorary position.

My 3GS was in use by my Cousin-in-law who I am sponsoring to interest her in a career in tech. She’s got a website where she does iOS tutorials as well as app reviews. So I am seeing that – however far – related to my business and thus can justify the expense. It greatly pained me when I learned that the volume button had jumped off the device. “Dropped? Me?! NEVER!”

Thankfully I was able to get it restored to better-than-before mint-ness. This is how.

1 Comment

NOT a Radar: Missing IR Remote Settings

Aug 24, 2012

I was about to file a second Radar from out latest AirPlay Experiments. When I was remote-controlling the AppleTV my colleague complained that stray radiation was also changing his speaker volume. When we looked at his Security Settings we couldn’t find the settings to disable IR.

But the solution was not to file a Radar and proceed to sulking. The problem lay in my own ballpark.

0 Comments

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