Happy New Year! Closing Out 2009

Well, Happy New Year!Thus ends (almost) my first full calendar year working exclusively with Apple technologies and also my first full calendar year as a published book author. I started working on Beginning iPhone Development in March of 2008, but because of the NDA and very beta-status of the early SDK releases, didn't start full-time writing on it until after WWDC 2008.It's been a hell of a year. We finished the year on a positive note: More iPhone 3 Development shipped out a few days ago and some people have received it already. I've also heard that Beginning iPhone Development is fairly close to breaking 100,000 copies sold between the two editions. It's hard to say for sure if that has happened because of the way books are inventoried and sold, but our sell-through (books known to be...

Read more »

Posted in: Update

MDN Community Awards

Today, somebody let me now that I've been nominated for the MDN Community Awards 2009. This came as quite a shock. I'm not sure who nominated me, but thank you. It's incredibly flattering to see my name listed alongside the names of so many people that I admire and respect. I really don't envy the people at MDN who have to make the final decision on this. There are some really awesome people on that list, and I expect several more names to be on the list before all is said and done. It's not going to be an easy list to narrow do...

Read more »

Posted in: Design Awards,MDN

Updated Navigation-Based Core Data Application Template

Periodically, while working on the Core Data chapters in More iPhone 3 Development, I would update my copy of Apple's provided Navigation-Based Core Data Application project template with logic to handle different common scenarios. While working on the previous blog post, I made some more tweaks to the template to better handle object changes that trigger managed objects to move between sections when specifying a sectionNameKeyPath. You can find the most recent version of this project template here, and I've included the four delegate methods from the template at the end of this blog post.I've really tried to give NSFetchedResultsController the benefit of the doubt. It's a really, really great concept and when it works, I really like it, but the execution is way below Apple's normal level...

Read more »

Posted in: free code,Project Template,Xcode

SuperDB Core Data App with Sections

If you've gotten through the first few chapters of More iPhone 3 Development, you might be wondering why we included a sectionNameKeyPath when we didn't actually divide up the table into sections. What's the point of having the fetched results controller use sections if they're not displayed?The truth of the matter is that we originally planned to take the SuperDB application further than we were able to. Unfortunately, we reached a point where we had to cut it off and move on to other topics in order to both meet our deadline and to come in at a reasonable page count (as it was, we came in 250 pages over what we contracted for). Okay, we didn't actually meet our deadline, but we would have missed it by more.Dave and I agreed to stop working...

Read more »

Posted in: Book project,Core Data,Sample Code