In a previous post I wrote about How JSON compares to Apple property lists and the obstacles to converting data between them. That was a while ago but the post is still accurate, as far as it goes. But Swift changes the situation in some ways, so an update is in order. Recap: JSON vs.…
In my post about my custom presentation slide app I mentioned that because of time constraints, I decided against doing my own slide layout. Instead I’d do that in DeckSet, export my slides to PDF, and show the PDFs in my app. So, how do you do that then? Getting a PDF on the screen…
Apple’s developer tools provide a rich variety of debugging aids. Sometimes though, it’s useful to do things the old fashioned way. With debugging, this often means just printing out data while your code runs, and then looking through the results to see what’s going on. Some scenarios where printing debug data helps include: When you…
This is a story of how a trip to a karaoke bar led to me writing my own app to display presentation slides. Of how a user interface that allows live smartass comments led to me being completely nerd sniped until I was able to do something I’ve never seen in a conference session– however…
Aaaaand, I’m back. It’s been a long time since I posted anything here. Mainly this was because I worked full time for a while. I found it hard to work all day on someone else’s project, then come home and do even more blog-worthy code-related stuff. At the end of the work day I was…
The Colorado Springs Gazette just did a nice feature article about BombBomb, the place where I write apps these days. The best part (for me) is that the lead photo shows Conor McCluskey (our CEO) showing off an iMessage extension I wrote for the company’s app.
Over the past year or so I’ve been trying out Resilio Sync (formerly BitTorrent Sync) as a possible alternative to Dropbox. It’s gradually improved to where I think I can rely on it. With my Dropbox subscription up for renewal in a couple of weeks, now’s the time. In this post I’ll describe how to…
I have a love/hate relationship with regular expressions. I love them because they’re great for examining text to find useful information and, often, to change the text in some way. I hate them because once you get beyond basic matching, they descend into bizarre write-only code that gives me flashbacks to my days writing Perl.…
This post is based on a lightning talk I gave at CocoaConf San Jose a couple of days ago. It’s that time of year– the time when summer time, or “Daylight Saving Time” as we for some reason call it in the USA– is ending. That time when a developer’s thoughts turn to date math…
I try to keep this blog on topic, sticking to technical posts of interest to iOS and macOS developers. So when I wanted to write about something else I set up a different blog unrelated to my business. As some of you are aware, when I’m not working on apps I’m also a radio DJ,…