Articles by Jonah Williams
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 own projects and pair with others to cross pollinate teams.
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 so on. As we move into mobile development we can benefit from many of the …
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 rather not expose in a release build. Looking at my device’s system log I see …
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 the air (directly onto a device without using iTunes) every time I check in code.
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 would prefer to let my API tests act as documentation of the expected API behavior …
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 been looking for a configuration which would allow me to run tests in a headless …
Building Xcode 4 projects from the command line
The Xcode 4 developer tools introduced some changes to the xcodebuild command line tool. Instead of specifying a project and target developers can now provide a workspace and scheme to build.
Using Open Source Static Libraries in Xcode 4
Xcode 4.0.1 allows us to more easily create and use third party libraries in iOS projects. I think the process is still more complicated than it needs to be. Xcode’s documentation suggests that it should automatically detect implicit dependencies and index classes across workspaces but I have not found this to be the case. Here …
Code Formatting in Xcode 4
Automatic indentation and cleanup of code seems to have improved in Xcode 4 (Editor menu – Structure – Re-Indent) but it still doesn’t offer full code reformatting or the flexibility of a tool like Uncrustify. If you’re used to having external code formatting in Xcode available you might be disappointed to find the User Scripts …
Abusing UIViewControllers
UIViewControllers are a fundamental building block of most iOS applications. Unfortunately many developers seem to use them in unintended and unsupported ways which leaves their apps vulnerable to bugs, rejections, unpredictable behavior under new iOS releases, and with controllers which are difficult to update or reuse. The core misconceptions behind this abuse of UIViewController are …