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As I switched over from Gmail to Fastmail.fm, I was looking for a mail client to replace my beloved Mailbox on iOS. I would have loved to continued using it, but it only supports Gmail, and not regular IMAP, so I needed a new client. Since I now have come to rely on the snooze […]
If you’re writing an iOS app and you need to know the user’s current location, the answer is straightforward: use Core Location. That fires up device GPS (when available). Apple’s A-GPS combines this with things like local Wifi networks and IP addresses to work out the device’s location. All of this, of course, assuming that […]
Over at the Big Nerd Ranch blog, my friend Mark Dalrymple continues his “Inside the Bracket” series with an article on practical uses of Objective-C’s run time introspection. Last time you saw the parts of the Objective-C runtime API that let you query a bunch of the metadata the compiler keeps around once it’s done […]
This week was DBX, Dropbox’s first ever developer conference. The big news as far as I’m concerned is their new Datastore API. In a break from their file-oriented past, Dropbox now has an API for syncing structured data between devices. I’ve long been a happy Dropbox user and I’ve lately been a frustrated iCloud developer. […]
Learning iPad Programming, 2nd edition, by the excellent Kirby Turner and myself, is finally available. This project has been in the works for a while and now it’s finally actually shipping and in print and stuff instead of just being preorderable. If you order now you can probably have your copy before I get mine. […]
In this latest installment of my iCloud series I’ll be taking a look at real world iCloud. Not in the sense of how you should write code to make effective use of iCloud, but in the sense of finding out how people are actually using it in real shipping apps. This was one of my […]
In today’s installment of my continuing series on using iCloud with Core Data I’m going to discuss how factors beyond your control may render iCloud unusable, even if everything is working normally. Even if everything is working correctly, the current API can still require complex workarounds to get decent app performance. Through this, keep in […]
From the README on github: momcom is a command-line tool for Mac OS X that takes an uncompiled Core Data model created with Xcode and compiles it to produce a compiled .mom or .momd suitable for use at run time. Please note that momcom is experimental. Although it is intended to be at least as […]
From the README on github: momdec is a command-line tool for Mac OS X that takes a compiled Core Data model and decompiles it to produce an equivalent xcdatamodel or xcdatamodeld suitable for use in Xcode. The resulting model file can also be used with mogenerator to produce source code files for Core Data entities […]
Today I’m continuing my series of iCloud/Core Data-related posts with a discussion of duplicate data, how and why it occurs, and what you can do about it in your apps. As with my previous post in this series, today I’m sticking to how things are supposed to work and sometimes actually do. The problem of […]