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May 30, 2011 (an Objective-C era article)
In this post I show two reusable classes for fetching data via HTTP: one that parses the result as XML and another that parses as JSON. These are relatively simple tasks but due to the number of required steps, they can become tiresome if you don't have robust, reusable code for the task. These classes will work on iOS or on the Mac but the optional error alerts and password dialogs are only implemented for iOS.
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May 5, 2011 (an Objective-C era article)
In this post, I'll show you how to use visual effects over a window to make a dialog sheet stand out when it is presented over the top. It's a pretty simple use of Core Image but is a useful technique to capture attention when needed.
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Apr 20, 2011 (an Objective-C era article)
Background audio in iOS is supposed to be as simple as entering a setting in your Info.plist and making sure your kAudioSessionProperty_AudioCategory is appropriate. This is true unless your audio is part of a movie file or is played in a movie player that has just played video — suddenly it becomes fiddly, hard to test, unreliable and changeable from version to version of iOS.
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Apr 5, 2011 (an Objective-C era article)
In this post, I'll look at best practice for using and managing text strings in your user interface. This is a fairly simple topic but Cocoa has established "best practices" for handling user interface strings that new Cocoa developers should be aware of. Since it is inevitably related, I'll also look at the steps involved in localizing the strings in your applications but remember: you should follow good practice for string handling, even if you have no intention of ever translating your application.
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Mar 25, 2011 (an Objective-C era article)
QuartzGL was introduced as an official feature in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard (although it was a developer-only feature in Mac OS X 10.4 as Quartz 2D Extreme). However, it is off by default and is largely ignored by most developers. In this post, I look at how to enable QuartzGL, the performance impact it has on different kinds of drawing and whether you should use it in your Mac programs.
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Mar 20, 2011 (an Objective-C era article)
After initially starting with a small set of fairly basic media APIs in iPhone OS 2.0, the APIs and the features they provide have dramatically increased in the past 2 years and provided a rapidly moving target for developers trying to remain current. In this post, I'll try to summarize all of the different APIs in iOS 4.3 for playing media, when they arrived, what their purposes are, what their limitations are and what it's been like to remain up-to-date and support new features.
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Jan 31, 2011 (an Objective-C era article)
In this post, I'll look at drawing a detailed image in code by combining multiple visual elements. Unlike previous posts I've done on drawing in Cocoa, this will focus on the AppKit classes. The code will use NSGraphicsContext, NSBezierPath, NSAffineTransform, NSGradient, NSGlyph and show you some simple ways to export the contents of an NSView to a file.
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Jan 26, 2011 (an Objective-C era article)
A number of websites are reporting that my application, StreamToMe 3.5 was approved with mention of a piece of future iOS functionality. While this was actually the case, it does not mean that Apple have started accepting apps for this new version of iOS.
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Dec 19, 2010 (an Objective-C era article)
In this post, I'll show you the current classes I use to construct and manage UITableViews in a number of different projects. This code is an amalgamation and evolution of some ideas that I've presented in a few earlier posts including my posts on heterogenous cells in a table view and easy custom table view drawing. But this implementation also chooses to do some things differently in an effort to continuously simplify the task of creating customized tables and views in iOS.
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Dec 12, 2010 (an Objective-C era article)
In this post, I'll take a quick look at how to keep your projects in git and how to manage that easily on the Mac. More importantly though, I'll take a look at why you'd want to do this, even if you're the only developer, you don't need to share your code, you don't have formalized releases that need to be tagged and you already have a backup system protecting your code.
