Progress in Developing iOS and Cocoa
Blocks, Literals, ARC and more have been added to Cocoa helping to ease many of the pains developers experienced in the past. It is an awesome time to be an iOS or Mac developer.
Kevin Sylvestre
Faster Testing in Rails with Guard for Zeus, RSpec, and Cucumber
Two awesome tools for speeding up testing are Zeus and Guard. Setting them up allows for automatic execution of tests while coding.
Deploying Rails with JRuby to Heroku
Deploying JRuby on Heroku used to require custom build packs. Not any more. This guide will get any JRuby app up and running in no time.
Setting Up Mac OS X For Development
Configuring a new Mac for development can be tricky. These steps will get any machine setup with Ruby, Node, Postgres and lots more.
NSError is NSAwful
Cocoa appears to be missing a key component to programming: exceptions. In place of the standard try / catch / raise style of programming error objects are used.
Must Have Services for Rails
Rails is amazing and can be even better when paired with great web services. Heroku, Amazon, Zencoder, Twilio, Tropo and New Relic all fit the bill.
Non-Blocking Long Running Tasks on iOS
Avoiding delays on the UI thread in iOS is key to ensure a snappy interface. Long running should be queued in operation queues to make sure they don't impact perceived performance.
Copy Paste Menus in iOS
Copy and Paste Menus in iOS can be tricky to setup. This code example should help with the basic syntax for getting one up.
Extending Objects in Cocoa with Categories‎
Adding in functionality to an existing class in Cocoa is easy using categories. This can be useful for methods that should be transient or when access to the original code is restricted.
A Few Reasons Cocoa Is Not That Hot
Over the past year Apple has released an amazing set of phones and tablets. While the devices are incredible the framework and language have a few shortcomings that Apple will have to address.