Category Archive for ‘Administrative’

I spent last week at several beaches in Corsica and when I came back I figured I would want to prolong the silence of not reading e-mails for one more day. And how peaceful that felt, I can only recommend that. Instead I spent Monday in my hammock an continued reading a Clive Cussler novel.

When I returned to my office on Tuesday I found more than 270 unread e-mails in my inbox. It took me around 4 hours to comb through these with a jackhammer and to trim it down to like a dozen or so that I will have to act upon.

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Seems like everybody is taking some time off in August. So we booked a last-minute vacation as well. There will be no e-mail checking until we get back, so please be patient with your requests and wishes.

We’ll be back at your service on August 23rd.

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Last week I finally gave in and shelled out for a wildcard SSL certificate for *.cocoanetics.com. This means that any address you have been using on this domain via HTTPS has been changed.

Previously you where using a self-signed certificate  which cause several problems, amongst those that you could not directly set up my Subversion repos you have access to in Xcode because you needed to first permanently accept the certificate even though it could not be verified. So you had to do the first checkout in terminal. Once accepted it would work in Xcode too.

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After working full throttle on the scribd app and struggling to keep two more deadlines the past few weeks where really taking their toll. So today begins a week of downtime for me. We – that’s me, my wife and our dog – have rented an apartment and I had to promise not to bring any devices…. except the iPhone.

“Honey, what if we get lost? I need the maps app to steer us back to civilization!”

You get the picture. 🙂 See you on the other side.

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Somebody people told me that some function in my NSAttributedStrings+HTML would take forever but whenever I tested it, I could not see anything wrong. Then Stuart Carnie was able to send a snippet of code that, when pasted into appDidFinishLaunching, would exhibit the same problem, duplicatable.

I was stumped at first. How could I have missed it? But at second glance Stuart did not reference any of my classes, but was only using standard SDK calls. Yet, those are almost identical to what I had wrapped into DTCoreTextFontDescriptor, my Objective-C wrapper.

Then it dawned on me: this might be a lazy loading problem. Or maybe even a bug in CoreText.framework.

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Fans of this blog and twitter followers alike will have a chance to get a free copy of Portal 2 on Steam. This highly anticipated game will be released on April 19th, round about the time when @Cocoanetics will surpass 2500 followers on Twitter.

When I went to Steam to pre-order my copy I saw an offer to buy two copies and give one away. So I thought that this might be a nice way to say “thank you!” for you being a frequent visitor to my blog and for following me on twitter.

To participate all you need to do is tweet the following text. On April 19th I will have tweetaways select a random winner from all the ones who tweeted the correct phrase.

Portal 2 Giveaway by @cocoanetics (BTW a great source for iOS dev info): http://bit.ly/g5nsKG #raffle

Good Luck!

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I’ve been hired by scribd to help jumpstart one of their iOS-related projects. That means I’ll soon grab my bags and hop onto a train that brings me to Vienna from where my plane leaves early morning Saturday, March 12th. I will be flying via London Heathrow to San Francisco where two busy work weeks are awaiting me.

I am mentioning this for some reasons, obvious and less obvious ones. Of course I like to gloat a bit, but I am also mentioning my trip because it might cause extensive delays when responding to your e-mails.

Just how does one land such a gig? I can only assume that my online activities and networking have played a role. This includes my educational articles from which people might deduct that I am serious about Cocoa. It also includes my open source projects, one might think that CoreText might be one of the technologies that scribd has a vested interest in.

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You might have stumbled upon my site because of the variety of iOS development topics I am covering. I generally try to make any interesting thing I’m learning myself into an educational blog post. There are the things I stumble upon myself, those I document in the Recipes section. And whenever somebody sends me a question I try to answer it with code, examples and so that both our knowledge increases.

Let me summarize the ways how you can express your gratitude. There is a variety of options you have and if you make use of them I will be happy. Which in turn causes me to write more. Win-Win.

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I have to admit I am rather close to being stressed out at the moment. In this article I will try to summarize all that’s going on in my head to find a strategy or guideline as to how to deal with a good problem to have “too much work”.

I made a promise to take one day off per week to recharge my batteries. Writing helps me do that and so I hope to share a few insights into my complicated brain while at the same time asking for your forgiveness if you have to queue to have me look at your code.

But first, I want to show off my new battery I had put into my MacBook Pro. It’s one of the first ones that no longer has a “user serviceable battery”. I could have sent it in to an authorized Apple repair center, but instead I opted to call upon a friend of the Austrian Cocoaheads who happens to be an “authorized Apple screw-driver”.

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