Cocoanetics

Apple-tab-span

Jun 05, 2013

An editor has to deal with the user hitting the tab key on an external keyboard and then be able to persist these tabs. Thus the question arose how I would best represent tab characters (\t) in HTML. At first I tried to encode them as 	 entities, but that is causing lots of trouble since on the parsing end it is difficult to know whether a tab came from this entity or if it came from the literal \t.

I could have done that with a very ugly hack of libxml2 (which powers my DTHTMLParser), but after having wasted half a day on this I relented. I previously reported my findings about Apple-converted-space which is the method NSHTMLWriter uses to preserve multiple spaces.

In this article I am documenting my findings related to how Apple conserves tabs for HTML output.

4 Comments

Reading Into The WWDC App

Jun 04, 2013

7 days (and change) before the WWDC 2013 Keynote presentation Apple released the official app to accompany the conference. Due to the (sudden, unexpected, surprising) sell-out of the conference Apple decided on several changes.

For starters the WWDC app allows all registered developers to log in and provides benefits even for developers who did not score a golden ticket. In previous years – if I remember correctly – the app would only let you see its contents if you had an activated WWDC to your name.

WWDC 2013 is even more highly anticipated than any previous Apple event due to the widespread notion that Apple is doomed if they don’t announce many big and impressive new things. For lack of anything better to pick apart, let’s do a bit of tea-leaf-reading on the WWDC 2013 app.

9 Comments

DTFoundation 1.4.2

Jun 03, 2013

The update was necessary because I had forgotten to add DTSidePanelController to any static library. Without that you could only compile it directly into your app, instead of being able to link in the lib and use it from there.

When I added it to the iOS Static Library and Static Framework targets I found out that I had already coded the delegate to use weak references. The general deployment target (minimum OS version) is still iOS 4.3 which did not support zeroing weak references.

So I also added zeroing weak references support in DTFoundation, via DTWeakSupport.h.

4 Comments

WWDC iWatch with Pebble

Jun 01, 2013

There will most likely not be an iWatch this year, the Pebble is what comes closest to it. It does have an internal ARM-based CPU and it can communicate with iOS devices over bluetooth. There are two kinds of of things you can build for it: watch faces (which don’t have any interaction) and apps.

For today’s project I want to try to put together a watch face that shows the WWDC 2013 Logo and a countdown to the keynote on Monday, June 10th.

Update June 2nd: I made the UTC offset changeable and released a build of the app via mypebblefaces.com

29 Comments

AutoIngest for Mac 0.5.1

May 31, 2013

This maintenance update improves Reachability handling. It implements the improvements in DTFoundation made to DTReachability.

2 Comments

DTFoundation 1.4.1

May 31, 2013

This maintenance update for DTFoundation fixes a few minor issues and adds a new custom-colored disclosure indicator.
Read more

2 Comments

WWDC Scholarship App (1)

May 29, 2013

Hello. My name is Janie Clayton-Hasz. This year I applied for the WWDC Student Scholarship through Apple.

This is a multi-part series of blog posts chronicling my experiences while going through this process, including the outcome and my thoughts on the process.

6 Comments

DTRichTextEditor Framework Demo Updated

May 28, 2013

I finally got around to updating the DTRichTextEditor time-limited Demo for Version 1.5. The new version broke a few items in the Demo because of the introduction of the text attachments class cluster.

The Demo is available on GitHub, the only other ingredient you need is a time-limited binary build of the DTRichTextEditor.framework.

5 Comments

QA: Consultant or Employee

May 25, 2013

Over my iOS developer career so far I’ve had several people ask me in one way or the other if and how I would want to work for them. This includes several international corporations, though I’d prefer to not name names. The range of such questions ranged from asked if I wanted to join a specific team all the way to an acquisition-hire.

Just this morning I found this email in my inbox:

Oliver, would you prefer to be “consultant” or part of a team. Here is our vision, its […]

I had begun to compose a lengthy e-mail, but my efficiency sense tingles when I pass a certain threshold. So I figure I want to document my thoughts on this question for future generations and interested readers.

7 Comments

DTFoundation 1.4

May 24, 2013

Today I have for you two special goodies. I used the entire day today to put the finishing touches on two new components that you find released in version 1.4 of DTFoundation.

On a recent project I was fed up with having to deal with a SQLite database “by hand”. So I wrote a wrapper for it that allows you to interact with the database in convenient Objective-C, as well as perform queries on a background queue.

The second new project is what the general public has come to call a “Hamburger Menu”. This is the kind of side panel menu that you can see in many popular apps.