iOS ← Designated Nerd

What’s Next 1

Jun

1

2019

I moved to the Netherlands in August of 2017 when Lilia (then my girlfriend, now my fiancée) got a two year fellowship at Radboud University in Nijmegen, and kindly allowed me to tag along. I’ve tremendously enjoyed living in the Netherlands, but we made the decision to move back to the US in the fall ...

For Kim

Aug

22

2016

Many of you in the iOS community know Daniel Steinberg. Even if you don’t know him personally, you’ve probably seen one of his many outstanding talks about Swift. If you know him personally, you know that Daniel is a wonderful, warm, kind person. As many of you have already heard, Daniel’s wife Kim passed away after a car accident ...

The Future Of Mobile: The Finished(?) Product

Jul

26

2015

Huge thanks to everyone who contributed slides to #SlideDeckKaraoke talk for SeanCon yesterday. Particular thanks to Isaac for some delightfully devious work putting this together, and my girlfriend Lilia for agreeing to film it with my phone at the last second. I’ve added some subtitles to the bits for which I am not speaking English. ...

The Power Of Working Code

Feb

16

2015

I like to give my partner Aaron a bit of shit about his Objective-C code. It’s the work of someone who’s only been wrapping his head around Objective-C for a year and a half – not someone who’s been using it full-time for four years. It’s copy-pasta, it’s poorly architected, it’s sometimes taking 400 steps ...

Assumptions != NSNotFound

Nov

16

2014

I couldn’t figure out why an equivalent of this code: kept having a bunch of crashes in “String was found, do stuff” section of the code in Hum. Turns out, messages to nil which return a struct will return with all of the members of the struct initialized to zero. If passedInVariable was nil, rangeOfString ...

Collection Data Types In Swift: Detailed Test Results

Nov

4

2014

I wrote a piece for RayWenderlich.com about Collection Data Structures in Swift, and I did a whole lot of performance testing around it that didn’t have room to make it into that piece. I’m going to be going into waaaaay more detail and burying you in charts in this blog post if you want to ...

Before and After: Time Converter 24

Feb

14

2014

There’s a running joke in the development world that the worst programmer you’ll ever meet is yourself from six months prior. When you open up code you wrote three years ago, you’d better be ready for bats to start flying out. I recently updated the iOS version very first app I ever wrote, Time Converter ...

Fun with Work Downtime: Cat2Cat

Jan

20

2014

My employers at Vokal Interactive have been kind enough to let me use my downtime to tackle of one of my biggest irritations with the new Asset Catalogs in Xcode 5: The fact that you still have to use the fragile imageNamed: system to call images in code. With the consultation of some co-workers and ...

Force Quitting All Your “Running” iOS Apps To Save Battery Life Is Total Bunk

Aug

15

2013

I had to go to the Apple Store earlier this evening to get my trackpad fixed (and they totally cranked out a fix in 10 minutes – thanks, guys!), and I overheard a Genius telling a couple complaining about the woman’s phone’s battery life that they could save battery life by force-quitting all their “running” ...