“Don’t you just turn on iCloud syncing, and it all Just Works?” “Just works” might be the customer experience; but developers must do more to support iCloud (or any new OS technology) than simply flipping a switch. Things can go wrong, and they often do. Rich gets into a lot more technical detail than most…
Once upon a time Apple would announce dates for their World-Wide Developer Conference and those of us who were interested would calmly begin planning our trip. The only urgency came from making sure to buy a ticket in time to get the earlybird price. Those were the days. Now, the announcement of WWDC dates triggers…
After far too long I’m rebooting this site to bring it up to date, in a variety of ways. Partly to bring the content up to something reasonably recent. For the past few years I’ve worked as an iOS and Mac OS X contract developer for a variety of clients. Atomic Bird is not at…
A couple of weeks ago Matt Long was having a problem with an app running out of memory. He had a ginormous data file he needed to load up and process, and that memory hit was more than the app could bear. It would load just fine, into an NSData, but before he could finish…
I’m Tom Harrington, a veteran of iOS and macOS software development. Since 2002 I’ve developed award-winning software for both clients and end users for Apple platforms including iPhone, iPad, and Mac. If you have an interesting project in mind, I’d love to hear about it. Contact me to discuss how we can work together to…
I’d love to hear from you! But every time I’ve set up a contact form on my web site it’s been heavily spammed. Rather than fight an ongoing battle against entropy, I’ve decided to not include a form on this site. I can be reached through a variety of popular social and professional networks, including…
Atomic Bird’s Mac OS X titles have been discontinued and are now free. They may be downloaded and registered using information below. Note that this software is unsupported and may not work normally with the current version of Mac OS X. Macaroni Macaroni was a tool that handled regular system maintenance on Mac OS X.…
I’ve always been a fan of retro tech, and this became even more true after AI swooped in and removed the soul and passion of all modern technology. I often go to my local second-hand stores to look at their games section in search of old gems, but I also pass by their electronics section…
One of my issues with current AI models is how they try to mimic human social patterns (things like “great question!”, “hmm, let me think”, “you’re absolutely right!”, you know it). I’m not sure why these irk me as much as they do (maybe the combination of it being completely unnecessary with how obviously fake…
I’ve written a couple of posts in the past about how my home network and home automation setup is laid out, but it changed so much over time that it’s now time for an updated post! This time I’ll put everything together in the same post. Part 1: Network stack My network infra is entirely…