Transmit: Don’t Panic on Pro iPad Apps

There’s been a lot of talk lately about Panic Ceasing Development on Transmit. It’s once again lead to a bunch of gloom and doom about making a living on the App Store and the future of pro apps on the iPad. Personally, I think this isn’t about the iPad business model - I think it’s about market fit. I bought Transmit for iOS. I don’t remember the last time I used it.

Fragmented Capital - It Just Got Harder to Be an iOS Indie Developer

With Apple’s announcements yesterday, it just got a lot more expensive to develop for Apple’s ecosystem. I’ve written before about why it’s important to test your code on as many different devices as you can before you ship. That’s been getting harder and harder over time, but it just got a whole lot worse. Up until now, Apple pretty much only released one new iPhone a year. Yes, they released two last year, but the 5C wasn’t all that different from the 5 for programming purposes, so many of the devs I know skipped it.

Finding relevant WWDC videos

As I’ve said before, I find the WWDC videos to be invaluable and I try watch all of them eventually. But there are a lot of them, and it can be hard to find what’s relevant. And a lot of them I go back and watch again when I start working with a different part of a project. So I’ve developed a trick, and I thought I’d share it with you all.

New Work In Progress - Million Words: Multiplayer Crossword Game for Parents and Kids that Grades on a Curve

Although I do iOS Contracting to pay my bills (at least to date), I hope one day to earn a living from my own apps, and, although it’s not ready for release, the time has come to unveil my new project.

Million Words is a turn-based crossword game where you’re scored not by what letters you managed to get into your word, but by the grade level of your word, relative to your age. This way my six-year-old daughter could play “HELLO” and I could play “HELICOPTER” and we would get the same number of points (more or less).

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.

How can you edit, build and install iPhone and iPad Apps without being near a Mac?

I’m going to walk you through the process that XCAB uses (These steps are taken from this SlideShow). I have a refurb mini in my Living Room that I bought to be an Home Sharing server, and it’s more than up to the task. I’ve run it on my laptop, too, from time to time. As far as the iOS device, an iPad is obviously better to use for editing, because of the screen real estate, but the process is the same for both.

Video Demo: How to program an iPad by using an iPad, no jailbreak required

Here’s a video I put together to demonstrate how to use the code that I wrote that I blogged about last week to program an iPad with an iPad, without having to lug your laptop around with you (or jailbreak your device): Please excuse the fuzziness, I recorded it from my iPad 2 using a setup that converted it to a Standard Definition Analog TV signal along the way. Hopefully, it is close enough that you can get the idea of how it works.

Programming an iPad with an iPad: Putting the "Mobile" into Mobile App Development

This is a talk I gave on Thursday at the Austin CocoaCoder group (and here is the PDF if you don’t do Flash): Developing iOS apps on your iPad with XCAB View more presentations from Carl Brown The code is here on GitHub, and you’ll need this version of iOS-BetaBuilder and accounts with Boxcar and Dropbox. It’s not perfect, yet. There’s no provision for managing XCode projects or xib files (you’ll still have to do all that on the Mac), no auto-complete or refactoring or debugging or instruments and the lag and long cycle time gets old.

The Hard Stuff - iPhone App Design Edition

I was talking to my latest iPhone App customer today, and now that we’re both able to look at the prototype, we were talking about the features that we could add before the shipping version, or not. We talked about trade-offs, and I heard myself saying the same thing I’ve said many times before, so I thought I’d write it down. There are three really hard things about iPhone Apps (at least to me - I have a background Enterprise and Web Apps).

Alternating accessoryView and accessoryType in UITableViewCell

Quick post about a problem I had today. I’m writing an app for a client that has a checklist component. So a UITableViewCell is in an unchecked state, and then when the user hits it, it becomes checked. I like the look of the UITableViewCellAccessoryCheckmark, so I’m using it, but I needed something when the cell is unchecked, so I’m using a png that has a circle. I was having a problem that when the cell was unchecked and I tapped on it, nothing appeared to happen, although if I went to another screen and came back to that one the check box would show up.

A Tale of Two Table Views - my UISearchBar Race Condition that I finally found

OK, so I finally found my race condition, I’d talked about here and here. So, in my KidChart app, I have a UITableView that has a list of all behaviors that people can pick from: and in the search box above, people can start typing to narrow down existing behaviors and then click on one so they don’t have to scroll as much. As soon as the UISearchBar gets focus, it does this:

UI Automation App Input

So, I’ve been doing more UI Automation test work, and I’ve discovered a couple of things. I’m kind of trying to write them up as I run into them, although I’m putting together a helper library that I’ll announce at some point, hopefully soon. So, what I’m trying to work on is a race condition in my KidChart app. The issue (I think) has to do with notifications during input into an UISearchBar.

Apple iOS iPhone UI Automation Testing: What does Accessibility have to do with it?

Trying to do some UI Automation testing going on one of my Apps today. Have a race condition, so I want to have a script to run it over and over again to have a better chance of catching the problem (more on that in a later post). So, I just wasted 2 hours trying to test this structure: And the problem was that I had this set in Interface Builder: