One of the most promising and mysterious new frameworks introduced in iOS 3.2 is Core Text. Apple defines Core Text as a “text drawing engine”, which allows Mac (and now iPad) apps to render rich text on any graphics context. Strings drawn with Core Text feature lots of custom settings such as detailed font information, [...]

It is very important that iPhone and iPad applications use visual styles in a coherent way. This helps users learn how to use your application faster, it helps them scan your UI for important information as quickly as possible, and it also can convey a strong marketing message; companies who want iPhone or iPad applications [...]

As I promised on Twitter, here’s a small discussion about the problems brought by the “initWithContentsOfURL:” family of methods. A quick search in the Xcode documentation browser brings in an interesting list of classes including this initializer (with or without additional parameters): NSArray NSManagedObjectModel NSData NSDictionary NSXMLParser NSMappingModel NSString AVAudioPlayer Don’t get me wrong, the [...]

Our first blog post of 2010 presents a tool that we’ve been using internally and that might be useful for other people. As you might have experienced, prototyping applications in Interface Builder is fine as long as you don’t deal that much with UITableViewController instances. Prototyping user interfaces with tables and navigation is not as [...]

Yes, it’s possible. Even if Objective-C is one of my preferred programming languages, in any case I think it’s worth mentioning that, 2 years after the official iPhone SDK has been announced, the iPhone development landscape has really grown up, and many, many different options are available today. This article provides a very high-level enumeration [...]

Xcode does not impose any structure to your source code tree. This is both cool and useful to quickly throw a couple of lines for a prototype, but in my experience, this approach does not scale. More often than not, without any hygiene, your project can become a mess. Just using Xcode defaults, after a [...]

A recent comment by Joe D’Andrea in a previous post reminded me about the importance of removing compiler warnings in Xcode projects. Most importantly, it reminded me of a conversation with a fellow developer a couple of weeks ago, in which he told me that he was surprised to see that my projects compiled all [...]

Memory management in the iPhone is a hot topic. And since tonight I’m talking about it on tonight’s monthly meetup of the French-speaking Swiss iPhone Developers group, I might as well share some tips here from my own experience. I won’t go dive through the basics; I think that Scott Stevenson did a great job [...]

This is happening right now, at a web agency near you. The dot-com boom of the 90′s spawned a brand new generation of coders and software developers, including me, by the way. While before that time the term of “software developer” might have been reserved to system programmers fluent in C, COBOL, C++ or other [...]