Accessorizer 2.0 is out!

Accessorizer by Kevin Callahan is one my absolute favorite utilities, as I've mentioned before. Well, now, there's a new reason to love it. Kevin just released 2.0 over the weekend. And there's great news for those of you who have bought previous versions: it's a free upgrade.If you do any serious amount of Objective-C programming, Accessorizer should definitely be in your toolb...

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Posted in: Xcode

Core Data and Threading

I've had a number of people ask me lately about the best way to handle using Core Data in a multi-threaded application. I began to put together a tutorial and sample code based on Apple's documentation, which advises to pass NSManagedObjectIDs between threads to get around the fact that threads can't share instances of NSManagedObjectContext or NSManagedObject. I've used this approach in several projects and it works.While googling around doing research, however, I came across a post by Marcus Zarra on the Mac Developer Network.Marcus knows Core Data really well, having written a book on the topic, so I figured I'd take a look at what Marcus had to say on the matter. I'm glad I did. Marcus illustrates a really great approach in his post that obviates the need to pass ManagedObjectIDs around...

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Posted in: Core Data,NSOperationQueue,Threading

The Martian Invasion: Announcing MartianCraft

About four months ago, I joined together with my friend and co-author, Dave Mark and with Rob Rhyne, developer of the awesome Briefs prototyping tool, to form a new mobile software development company specializing in the iPhone and Android platforms. This software development firm is what I've somewhat cryptically been referring to "Super Secret Project A"¹, but its real name can now be revealed as: MartianCraft.Our original plan had been to do a public announcement long before now, but something unusual (yet good) happened. Before we ever made our announcement, before we ran our first advertisement, before the ink was even dry on our incorporation papers, we got busy. Really, really busy. Our little covert, unannounced software development...

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Posted in: Contracting,MartianCraft,Software Development

Downloading Images for a Table without Threads

It is common practice in many networking libraries in many languages to spawn threads to handle asynchronous communications in the background while the rest of the program continues to function. Although this approach does work on the iPhone, it's really not the right way to do it. I've recently run across two different blog postings that show how to download images for display in an iPhone table view, and they both did synchronous network communications using threads.Here's my Public Service Announcement for today: Don't. Please… just, please don't, okay? Don't spawn threads for asynchronous communications unless you would have used threads in the same situation if there was no network code..Note: A few people have suggested that this post...

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Posted in: Sample Code,tutorial

Pre-WWDC Pilgrimage Sign-Up

If you think you're interested in traveling from Downtown San Francisco to One Infinite Loop, Cupertino on Saturday Sunday, June 6th to go to Apple's Company Store, or if you live in the area and just want to join us for lunch, please fill out this questionnaire. This does not obligate you to attend, it just will help us make sure that everybody who wants to go down, has a chance.If there aren't enough drivers to carpool, we may look at what it would cost to charter a bus or van. We will notify everyone before we do so with the cost so people can decide if it's worth it. Hopefully, we'll be able to get everyone down without the hassle though.Please do spread the word on your blogs and over Twitter so we can include everyone who wants to be includ...

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Posted in: Apple HQ,WWDC

Gradient Buttons Yet Again

I added two more button styles to the iPhone Gradient Buttons project and made stroke color and stroke weight configurable options. The two new styles look exactly like the old Black and White style, only the highlight state is a blue gradient. These simulate the style used in alert sheets in several Apple applications.Some of the Core Graphics code was machine-generated and is in kind of rough shape, but it works. I'm thinking about refactoring the different styles methods into something shorter, perhaps a plist, or just C arrays with the different numeric values.For some strange reason, when I try to use arrayWithObjects: instead of creating a mutable array and manually adding the colors one at a time, I get a NULL gradient back. I have no...

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Posted in: Core Graphics,Open Source

The Illusion of Open

Today, on Twitter, I've been having some back and forth with John Wilker, one of the founders of the 360|iDev Conferences about Android and the concept of "openness". The discussion really helped to clarify some of my thoughts on the matter (thanks, John!).Now, I've been somewhat harsh on Android at times, but the things I'm harsh about are details and personal programming platform preferences. It's actually a pretty good platform with a huge amount of potential. It now appears to have reached the critical mass needed to really propel it forward, and I do have high hopes that it will keep moving forward, getting better, and pressuring Apple to do even more amazing things than they would have otherwise done.Yesterday, Google IO ended, and it was clear from the tone of the conference that Google...

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Posted in: Android,iPHone