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Pending Developer Release

Jun 08, 2012

My fingers have started hurting from keeping them crossed for the past week. We submitted the Linguan 1.1 update for review just in time before the Sandboxing deadline hit on June 1st. Linguan has two problems with sandboxing:

  • Currently the user picks an xcodeproj and Linguan processes the files linked from that. With sandboxing this is no longer possible, we have to modify it such that the user would pick a project folder instead through powerbox to gain access to all contained files.
  • The new version is remote-controlling the ibtool command line utility contained in Xcode. I’ve not done any research but it is highly likely that sandboxing will not allow this either.

So you can understand our situation? Either release it now, or never. Well may be not really never, but it will take a lot of time to reverse-engineer ibtool so that we can include the functionality directly in the app binary.

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Painting the World with WWDC

Jun 07, 2012

Very few people that I know are actually using Apple’s Find my Friends (FmF). Some because they fear about the lifetime of their iPhone battery, others because they abhor the feeling of being “stalked”. But those are really just myths.

FmF allows you to either share your position with somebody specific permanently or to create a temporary event that automatically ends at a given time. So I figured that it would be a cool experiment to use that for sharing positions of WWDC delegates all around the world. I started a temporary WWDC group and told people on Twitter about it.

In very short time I reached a level where FmF would not allow me to add any more people to this group. This level is 50. So I began to split off Europe and Australasia and the latest iteration of this shuffling is to have 4 regions:

  • North America
  • South America
  • Europe
  • Australasia

Doing this I developed the ambition to at least get one dot per region, a representative/ambassador if you will. My goal now is to keep collecting for one more day because many Europeans are hopping on their respective planes on Friday and most Americans are doing the travel on Saturday and Sunday.
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Podcast #38 – “Patents”

Jun 07, 2012

Episode 38, recorded June 6th 2012

I’m chatting with Jesse Goodman, a former patent lawyer, about patents.

Podcast: Download (30.8MB)

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Decorating Moscone … and Crazy Predictions

Jun 06, 2012

Last year the banners at the Moscone West conference center went up on the Sunday before WWDC. This year Apple is getting a head start and already started decorating on Tuesday the week before the big event.

It’s a patchwork of app icons accompanied by the slogan: “Where great ideas go on to do great things”.

Let’s over-analyze a bit, just because we can.

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Associated Objects

Jun 06, 2012

There’s a neat feature in the Objective-C runtime that very few people know about and even less dare to use them. Undeservingly so, because they are very useful. I’m referring to Associated Objects.

In this recipe I’ll show you how to use them and have a great example of where I used them myself … for the first time.

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1 Infinite Loot, Cupertino

Jun 05, 2012

There is one thing that you can only get in Cupertino: Clothing and merchandise with an Apple logo. With Apple being my favorite brand is probably quite understandable that will want to be wearing the bitten Apple whenever I can… as opposed to Nike which I prefer over other sports brands.

With Nike I like the simplicity of the Swoosh, that only gets beaten bit the Apple because Apple because of the simple fact that I owe my livelihood to the company from Cupertino.

Being in San Francisco naturally triggers the “Pilgrimage Syndrome” where people – similar to birds – seem to need to migrate South to settle at the Apple Company Store in Cupertino to fill the need for spending money on the mentioned merchandise.

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Scouting Ahead of WWDC

Jun 04, 2012

When traveling to the US for WWDC I learned that I need a few days to adjust my sleeping cycle so I added the week before the – then rumored – date to my itinerary. This provides me with some opportunities to scout ahead, meet local developers and catch up on the Movies.

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Mine is Longer than Yours

Jun 02, 2012

Everybody is shortening URLs these days. While this saves spaces in Tweets it has several disadvantages for the user: you don’t see the domain that this link refers to. And you know that for certain clicks on the short URL are recorded and data-mined. Just have a look at my public bit.ly timeline. I check there often … pure vanity.

You might remember my hobby project Tweet Curator which allows the filtering of tweets that have certain domains. Now the next extension of this concept would be to also expand those pesky short URLs and use the referred domains for blocking too. There is NO hiding any more!

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Let’s Bounce!

Jun 01, 2012

You probably have seen it hundreds of times, it’s become so natural to you that you probably don’t consciously notice it any more. I’m speaking of the bouncing of icons on the dock in OS X. The method how those pesky little critters (aka “Icons”) try to win your attention. Me! Me! ME!

This animation is probably the one you see the most in your day-to-day business working on code on a Mac. Yet I have never seen anybody using it in an iOS app. Why? It’s not that this animation is the sort of Clippy that everybody hopes to forget about some day. It’s something that well established and we know what it means.

When I asked around (on Twitter) and looked around (on Google) was only found a couple of “spring loaded” formulas, but nothing concrete that would enable me to get this animation added to my app. So I researched it and now I’m happy to present to you … 3 Methods of bouncing.

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Twitter Curator Demo

May 31, 2012

I get so fed up with how YouTube mangles the screen recordings of QuickTime that I purchased Screenflow. I wanted to show off my specialized Twitter search tool that I’m working on besides of my regular projects. A “Hobby” if you will.

I would very much appreciate if you would take a few minutes to watch it and then let me hear your thoughts. If you have some ideas for improvements then don’t hesitate to let me know.

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