What I Learned During my Mac App Store Review

Two things happened on Thursday that made it obvious to me what I should write about this week. Mountain Lion was announced, and my first Mac App was approved for the Mac App Store.

Even though iDevBlogADay is about iOS programming, more and more of us are moving from iOS to the Mac. With the announcement that GameCenter will be coming to OS X, I’m guessing that more iOS developers might be thinking about coding for the Mac now than might have been last week.

So today I’m going to talk about my experience in getting my first App on the Mac App Store and specifically the differences in the approval process between the Mac App Store and the iOS App Store.

Hey, iOS Devs, Nice AppStore. Would be a shame if something were to happen to it…

So, breaking iOS AppStore news this afternoon:  Path uploads your entire iPhone address book to its servers.

This sucks, and I’m pissed off, but not because my data is so precious, but because I’m scared of where this could end up.

HTTP Testing to the edge on iOS: The School of Hard Mocks

I’m a big fan of Automated Testing, even on iOS projects, but even when I was doing mostly Ruby, Java and C# work, I was never a big user of mock objects. Now, I’ll admit that Mock objects can be useful under some circumstances, but I’ve seen them used too often in cases where a bunch of different developers each build their own little fiefdoms of their own code surrounded by Mock Objects where they interact with anything else.

Using Regular Expressions Part 2 - The Cocoa Connection

Last time, in Part 1 of this series, I wrote about the basics of regular expressions, and the phrases I tend to use. Today, I’m going to talk about the mechanics of how I use Regular Expressions in Cocoa.

##But first, an historical diversion

In my opinion there are, two different ways that programming languages implement Regular Expressions: The perl/ruby way, and the Java/C#/Python/Cocoa way.

In ruby and perl, regexes are implemented directly on the String type, whereas in the other languages, there a separate object that contains the functionality. Here’s what you need to know to do a regex substitution on a string in ruby:

myString.sub(‘pattern’,‘replacement’)

clean, easy, and immediately useable if you know what pattern you want to use.

Here’s what you need to know to do the same thing in Cocoa:

+[NSRegularExpression regularExpressionWithPattern:(NSString *) pattern 
options:(NSRegularExpressionOptions)options error:(NSError **) error]

-[NSRegularExpression replaceMatchesInString:(NSMutableString *) string 
options:(NSMatchingOptions)options range:(NSRange)range 
withTemplate:(NSString *)template]

which is not clean, not easy and contains a bunch of stuff you have to go look up to be able to get started. What are NSRegularExpressionOptions and

NSMatchingOptions? What’s a template? Do I really have to create an

NSRange for this? And that leads to the obvious question: Is all this effort really worth it?

Now I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to spend any effort remembering any of those option parameters, and I don’t want to take the time to look them up any time I want to use a regular expression. To me, the beauty of Objective-C is that it gives us the ability to build most of what you need to know directly into the method signatures.

Using Regular Expressions and Retaining your Sanity

At a recent Austin, Texas Cocoacoder meeting, I made an offhand comment giving someone a regular expression that would help with a problem they were having. That led to two things. First, I was asked to put together a presentation (which I’ve been working on) on using regular expressions to give at an upcoming CocoaCoder meeting, and second, I was asked why on Earth anyone would use something as opaque and unmaintainable as a regular expression in this day and age.

360iDev Conference Notes, or How I Spent my September Vacation

This Thursday, I got back home after four days at 360iDev 2011 in Denver. I went last year, which was easy for me because it was in Austin where I live. I was concerned about the extra time and extra money it was going to take to go this year, since it was in Denver. Now that I’m back, I’m so glad I went. I have no hesitation about recommending it to other people, so that’s what I’m about to do.

Steal This Code and Protect Their Data: Simplifying KeyChain Access

##The Code The last couple of months, I’ve been working on my first Mac App (more on that in a later post). As part of this App, I’m calling a REST API that requires that I have the user’s password for that service to use in the API calls. Although that API is a minor part of the App, and although the service doesn’t have horrible consequences if someone gets the user’s password for it (in my opinion at least), there was no way I was going to store that password on disk unencrypted.

Not Feeling Entitled So Far (Sandbox or Dropbox, Pick Only One)

After reading this useful post, I thought I would take a few minutes and enable entitlements on my current Mac App project, just to see how it went. I thought I’d take a minute and blog about what I learned, both so I remember the next time I want to do this, and because I didn’t find any resources out there that explained some of this, so I had to do trial-and-error on some of it.