xcode
My Concise Introduction to CocoaPods
CocoaPods is now the industry standard for managing third-party frameworks and dependencies for iOS. There’s such a demand to make libraries work with CocoaPods that, even in its very early days, I actually received 5 requests to add a Podfile and tag before I even knew what CocoaPods was! Nowadays, I love it, and I’d […]
Asset Catalogs: Love Em or Leave Em?
I’ve never been to a WWDC, but each year I get positively gitty when the session videos become available. And what do I get the most excited about? No, not Passbook, iCloud, or the big-ticket stuff. No, I like the small stuff. The simple stuff. The stuff that improves my day-to-day and fixes things I constantly find annoying.
This year, that something was Asset Catalogs.
Why Asset Catalogs? Well, simple. Ever since we got the iPhone 4 in all it’s retina glory, I’ve always found it frustrating to manage keeping TWO versions of every graphic. (The original and it’s double-resolution version.) There’s so much monotony in it:
- I need to keep all the files paired together in Xcode, in the right order. (Partly due to OCD, partly due to basic organization.)
- I need to make sure they’re both named EXACTLY the same.
- If I want to rename an image, I GOTTA DO IT TWICE.
- I hate how much space it takes up on the Project Navigator when the folders inevitably all expand.
- I need to make sure the @2x is exactly twice the dimensions of the original. (Designers always flub this.)
Sadly, Asset Catalogs don’t fix #5, but they do help us a ton with the other four, and hey, that ain’t bad! Still, not all is rosy in a catalogued world, so let’s take a look, shall we?
Use Latest iOS
One of the quiet new features in the newest XCode release is a new BaseSDK option “Use Latest iOS”. Not all iOS developers will appreciate this unless they’ve been developing for at least 6 months or so. The problem Apple has solved was an infuriating one. Since an XCode project (a target specifically) can only […]
Comparing the iPhone and Android Development Environments
I’ve spent the last few weeks working on an Android project at work and, I have to say, I am having a familiar feeling of shock at how bad the Android development environment is. Here are some comparisons. Objective-C vs. Android First and foremost, using Java is much better than Objective-C. While I consider Java […]
IPA Targets for iPhone — Why and How?
Admittedly, one of the most annoying parts of building iPhone apps for clients is merely giving them the app to install. The usual case is that you hand them a *.app directory that, to a Mac user, looks like a file, but to a client using Windows it’s a directory. And when Windows users open […]
John Blanco
I've been writing mobile apps professionally for 10 years: Blackberry, Java, ME, iPhone, Android. I've gotten dozens of apps into the various App Stores for dozens of clients, big and small.
My current specialty is in iOS and Xamarin development. If you need an app written at a fixed price or just need a hourly developer to give a boost to your current team, I might be your guy.
Let's make an app!