Jonah Williams

Customizing the iOS keyboard

Our applications need input and the default iOS keyboards are often not optimally suited to providing the sort of data we want. When we find that we really wish the keyboard had some extra controls or want to help our … Continue reading

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Lightning talks at Carbon Five, 9/28/2011

Carbon Five had a set of lightning talks over lunch recently. Giving our designers and developers a chance to share recent experiences and side projects. A debate over the relative performance of different languages at our last hack night called … Continue reading

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Designing mobile APIs – dynamic content

On mobile devices native UIs offer superior responsiveness and performance but web views offer flexible layouts and data driven content. How can we combine the strengths of both to produce a highly responsive UI which can display dynamic data from … Continue reading

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Designing mobile APIs – error handling

While designing an api I need to provide reliable error responses to both protocol and application level errors. Here I’ll consider any error response generated outside our application stack to be a protocol error while those errors returned from my … Continue reading

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Project Time at Carbon Five

It has been two weeks so it is time for another Hack Night at Carbon Five. Before our space fills up with hungry hackers, we like to set aside 4 hours of project time for employees to work on their … Continue reading

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Designing mobile APIs – basic behaviors

As Rails developers we design APIs on a regular basis: routes for browsers to interact with a web app, JSON apis and routes for client side javascript to build dynamic pages, payloads queued for background processing on a server, and … Continue reading

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Debug logging with Xcode 4 breakpoints

NSLog calls do not belong in release builds. Logging is slow and the performance impact of log statements on a device can be considerable. Logging is also noisy, it can obscure useful debugging information and may leak information you would … Continue reading

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Automated ad hoc builds using Xcode 4

I’ve previously discussed Continuous Integration for iPhone Projects in TeamCity using Xcode 3 and Building Xcode 4 Projects from the Command Line. Now I’ll tie those together and use TeamCity to automatically create ad hoc builds I can install over … Continue reading

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Generating documentation from specs

On one of our rails projects I am creating an api to allow mobile clients to access a web service. I need to provide documentation of this API to the developers of several different clients during its development. Normally I … Continue reading

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Running Xcode 4 unit tests from the command line

Command line builds for Xcode 4 projects are a good first step but I really want to get my project’s tests running on a continuous integration server again. Since “test” isn’t a valid build action to pass to xcodebuild I’ve … Continue reading

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