For most iOS applications, we need to handle server communication. UIKit provides URLRequest which manages requests to server. In this post we’ll take a look at how we can extend it to simplify request debugging.

I was playing with Reactive Cocoa and Swift 2 lately and came upon common UITableViewCell reuse problem that I could solve in very elegant way. I’ll describe the problem and my solution for it in this blog post.

In fall a friend and me were working on an application called Alarm which was released recently. The application was made as part of Hone toolset and we were one of the teams that got early access as means of external evaluation and bringing in real world feedback during development process. In this blog post I’ll write about this experience.

In this post I’ll talk about MVVM - Model, View, View Model - pattern as another solution to massive view controller.

When I first started developing on Apple’s platforms (around april 2005), I was immediately impressed by strong architectural patterns embedded into core frameworks. It was part of that attention to detail Apple was and still is notorious for. It spreads into everything they do, from hardware, to software as well as SDK under the hood. In this blog post I’ll talk about one of those patterns and more specifically - problems it may bring and how to deal with them.

Taking a look at Swift with a bit more details on optionals.

Published OS X and iOS crash log symbolicator written in Swift on GitHub.

With todays vibrant world of iOS apps, there are usually many choices within the same category. So it’s easy to switch to another one. But how about the most important part of it: your data? Well, some developers offer a way to export or import, but unless you’re dealing with standard formats, it’s likely you have to enter all your data again. This blog post will look into how you can use your programming skills to import the data from one application to another.

After starting work on appledoc redesign, one of the first things I added was command line parsing. I used trustful DDCli library from Dave Dribin. However I soon discovered it doesn’t work well with arc. That, coupled with different workflow I wanted, prompted me to digg in Dave’s code to see how I could change it to suit my needs better. At the end I ended with writing a command line interface library from scratch.

Appledoc became quite popular amongs Cocoa developers, especially since 2.0. It also seen many contributions from various users. But it has become very hard to maintain. In this blog post I’ll describe the reasons and future directions.

Creating Mac application requires lots of though and effort into creating a good user experience too. Although generally Cocoa API and tools allow us spend more time on this, there are areas that could benefit from additional effort. When developing Startupizer 2.0, one such area I wanted to address was nicer about window with scrolling credits. This blog post demonstrates the solution I chose.

Almost two years ago, I wrote about organization and architecure of my Xcode projects. As all, I also envolved a lot during these few years. If nothing else, I released my first shareware application and I learned a lot from it. In this post, I’ll describe some of the changes to how I architecture my applications.

In September, I wrote about our Mac OS X 10.7 Lion Auto Layout. As auto layout is one of the building blocks for laying out user interface for next major update of Startupizer, and being new technology, I came across few issues that took me a while to figure out. In this post, I’ll cover some of them for my future reference and hopefully shed some light for those of you stumbling upon the same walls.

In my previous post (part 1 and part 2), I talked about new Lion feature - view-based table views. I skimmed over auto layout briefly. In this post, I’m going to talk about it a bit more. We’ll update the example app from previous post to use auto layout and see what changes are required when porting existing code. In addition, we’ll take a look at how we can use auto layout with view controllers and dynamic view hierarchies.

With OS X 10.7 Lion, Apple has introduced many cool features to it’s AppKit. One of those that caught my attention right away, was view based table views. It seemed like the missing widget I was looking for when implementing Startupizer’s items list. So I decided to take a spin as a research for directions for 2.0 release. In this post, I’ll go step by step through a small project gradually adding features until it will look similar to current main window.

With OS X 10.7 Lion, Apple has introduced many cool features to it’s AppKit. One of those that caught my attention right away, was view based table views. It seemed like the missing widget I was looking for when implementing Startupizer’s items list. So I decided to take a spin as a research for directions for 2.0 release. In this post, I’ll go step by step through a small project gradually adding features until it will look similar to current main window.

Handling support and feedback is probably one of the most important things software developer teams face after releasing a product. The simplest way many of us use at the start is e-mail, but that soon becomes too difficult to manage. There are several online solutions available - FogBugz, Lighthouse or it’s “bigger” sister Tender are just few of those most often mentioned by developers.

We’re proud to announce we’ve released appledoc 2.0! It took several months of efforts, but the result is stable and easily extendable platform - what we envisioned for appledoc to be in the first place!

Those of you who follow me on Twitter already know that I was using MGTemplateEngine for generating appledoc html files. I tweaked it a bit to make it work for me – the main point was to add ability of function-like sections that can be called with arbitrary parameters.

In this post, I’ll add links to documentation generated with appledoc 2.0 in time. The post will be updated accordingly.

In the past days I’ve had an interesting e-mail interaction with a appledoc 1.0 user who had trouble with extracting documentation for methods of the first named section. Whichever section he would put first, it’s methods were not extracted. It’s a strange bug I’ve never experienced before. He even sent me an example header file and it looked correct.

As I get more and more reports for issues related to appledoc, and I tend to reply with similar message each time, I decided to write a post about support and news :)

I’ve checked several in-app user feedback frameworks, but found Tyler Hall’s OpenFeedback most usable - the code is very readable and consistent and it’s visually appealing as well. However I’ve been missing crash reporting option, so I’ve decided to roll my own.

Recently I’ve come across Justin Williams and Martin Pilkingtons posts describing their solutions about working with Core Data in single-window multiple-view applications.

In this post I’m talking about appledoc and directions I’m taking it in the future based on feedbacks and suggestions from users.

In a project I work on a need arose to have iPhone like on/off switch including the animation. Since I already use Core Animation for other purposes, a custom layer was immediate choice. I was bit surprised by not being able to find an example on internet, so I rolled out my own. In this post I’ll demonstrate the implementation I chose.

Most modern Mac applications are designed around single window / multiple views architecture. Examples are iPhoto, iMovie etc. Although this results in more streamlined user experience, it brings some issues for the developers.

After several long gaps I finally got some time to finish the remaining stuff on the appledoc utility. It now handles all the tasks I need and results in very elegant code documentation. Check it out!