The Future Of Mobile: The Finished(?) Product

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

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

Assumptions != NSNotFound
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

Collection Data Types In Swift: Detailed Test Results
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

Before and After: Time Converter 24
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

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 ...

The New Shiny And Its WordPress Friends

As you can see, I’ve updated DesignatedNerd.com to a brand spankin’ new site – I’ve cleared out a lot of the crud and moved everything over to a WordPress backend so that I could more easily take advantage of the awesome templating system available with it. In addition, I also updated EllenShapiro.com, my personal site. ...