"By the end of this blog post, you’ll know how to create an Xcode project that compiles a static library, exposing public headers to other projects in a way that makes them easy to #import, and how to use that project as a subproject in other projects."
You’ll also be able to include this project in superprojects as a submodule using Git

How to customise Xcode behaviour and tab setups

"Privacy patterns are design solutions to common privacy problems — a way to translate "privacy-by-design" into practical advice for software engineering. We believe design patterns can help document common practices and standardize terminology and while we're starting with a set of patterns for location-based services, we hope to build a living, community space where all can contribute their own patterns."

"The purpose of this guide is to ensure existing and future iOS and Mac products conform to a consistent and well-designed convention."

"Articles about programming in Cocoa are many and in many places. The majority of them are of very high quality. To help out, I made this collected index, searchable by title or by article content."

"Interface design for iOS is a very different beast from the web. Here, we bring you 50 invaluable ways to get it right every time"

"Turns out that above a certain size, WebKit is deciding to scale down the resolution of images."

Basic iOS / Xcode debugging processes. The basics, but a useful primer / aide memoire.

"Lightrail is a minimalist Rails 3 stack for apps that serve primarily APIs, with a particular focus on JSON APIs. This makes Lightrail an ideal Rails backend for client-heavy HTML5/JS applications, particularly single-page applications written in frameworks like Backbone.js, Ember.js, and Spine.

If Sinatra doesn't give you enough, but Rails is still too much, Lightrail is for you."

"RSOAuthEngine, in the words of the original author (Rodrigo Sieiro), is a ARC based OAuth engine for MKNetworkKit.

He originally posted his RSOAuthEngine on Github about a month ago. It is possibly the leanest implementation of Twitter oAuth I’ve ever seen. His sample code also contained a demo on how to use RSOAuthEngine with Twitter and with Instapaper."

"Through extensive observational research, I’ve discovered what works and doesn’t work for my daughter, so I’m going to shamelessly generalize my findings to all children and propose four essential guidelines for developers who work on iPad apps for children."

"The unit tests for my calendar use QUnit, but they really use just three functions: test, expect and ok. This article shows you how to integrate unit tests into your WordPress plugin, where to write unit tests and how they can help you."

You can *test* Wordpress? Wow. Who knew?

"Within Xcode, if you set the compiler option to Apple LLVM compiler 2.1 (or greater), you can move your instance variable declarations from the interface file to the implementation file." ooh, handy.

Let your users select photos in your app from any of their favorite photo services, not just photos they have stored locally. Completely free to use!

"The aim of this document is to get you started with developing applications with Node.js, teaching you everything you need to know about "advanced" JavaScript along the way. It goes way beyond your typical "Hello World" tutorial."

Yet another framework to give me that vague "really should look at this sometime" feeling of guilt in the back of my mind. Sigh.

"makandra cards is almost as powerful as a wiki, but much more accessible and easier to maintain:

organize information with simple cards
attach files to cards
automagically group cards into topics
full-text search with find-as-you-type
love the lightweight design
manage multiple decks and users
access your cards from any web browser
make chosen cards visible to the public (if you want)"

"We present a taxonomy of interactive dynamics that contribute to successful analytic dialogues. The taxonomy consists of 12 task types grouped into three high-level categories, as shown in table 1: (1) data and view specification (visualize, filter, sort, and derive); (2) view manipulation (select, navigate, coordinate, and organize); and (3) analysis process and provenance (record, annotate, share, and guide). These categories incorporate the critical tasks that enable iterative visual analysis, including visualization creation, interactive querying, multiview coordination, history, and collaboration."

"Adding colorized ls output to the Terminal in Mac OS X is a good way to make navigating around the command line a bit easier on the eyes."

"The iPhone was revolutionary for its use of direct manipulation – the feeling that you’re really holding content in your hands and manipulating it with your fingertips. While many mobile platforms have touch, it is the realistic physics and fluid animation of the iPhone that sets it apart from its competitors.

However, jerky scrolling ruins the experience. The new UI of Twitter for iPhone 4.0 contains many details that could impact performance, so we had to treat 60 frame-per-second animation as a priority. If you are troubleshooting animation performance, this post should provide some useful pointers."

Instructions for automating the build number of iOS apps with command line tools

Cucumber documentation (covers Sinatra and other non-Rails frameworks)

Useful instructions for setting up Postgres on OS X

"This post is predominantly about how I’ve found work in the first six months. This is a question that I have been asked time and time again by other, slightly wild eyed, mildly frantic designers/developers who have either made the break and gone freelance or are planning to make the break and go freelance. I myself also asked this question of other people many times in the early DAYS OF FEAR (I’ll come to those later).

HTML framework for ebook production
Ebook HTML framework design CSS code

Rather scarily detailed list of Ruby HTTP clients

Part 1: basics on naming classes, variables, accessors, general methods and abbreviations.
Part 2: more detail on method names, global symbols, the id type, method parameters, etc

just a simple guide for getting started with git. no deep shit ;)

"Use heatmaps to see where people touch your application's interface. Find UI controls spacing and size problems. Discover desired and mostly used UI functionality and improve your application's interface design."

"What's this all about?

Long story short: the Irish government plans, before the end of January, to bring in a law which would allow Irish courts to block access to websites accused of infringing copyright (and possibly do other things as well)."

"You have likely heard about SOPA, PIPA, and maybe even OPEN—but how does this legislation apply to game developers, and why have these pieces of legislation created such dissention? This FAQ clarifies the details about these bills and how they affect game development."

"I’ve got an idea for a new year’s resolution: Join the sketchnote revolution.
Sketchnotes are a visual form of note-taking that can include drawings, various lettering sizes and styles, color, icons, arrows, boxes and more — whatever works for you. I’d say that sketchnoting is officially a movement — maybe you’ve seen some from SXSWi or other conferences. And the best part? You don’t have to be a creative genius to do it. It’s called Sketchnoting, not Art School."

"A port of J Tarbell’s Substrate script to paper and pen

This project was made in about an hour (!) at Papercamp 2 with some card, a scalpel, and some red thread. It was an attempt to create a semi-faithful working representation of J Tarbell’s beautiful, famous, Substrate script — but one that would work with pen and paper instead of Processing."

"I'm currently experimenting with waking up at 5am to work on personal projects before heading to work.

Someone one Hacker News once mentioned they do this, and it stuck in the back of my head ever since. I've been at this for two weeks thus far."

Nice idea, if a potentially a little anti-social for cohabitees....

"Meaningful Transitions - Motion Graphics in the User Interface« deals with the use of animations in the user interface. It documents transitions in a clustered way to show at which point transitions can be a helpful extension to a static user interface, because of cognitive benefits to enhance the user experience."

"A simple yesod tutorial. Yesod is an Haskell web framework. You shouldn’t need to know Haskell."

I use RSpec in all my projects. It’s really hard to overemphasize how helpful it is and how much easier becomes your life if you have good specs coverage. But its outstanding flexibility enables many ways to make your specs awful: horribly slow, over-bloated, even non-readable sometimes. I do not want to teach you BDD and RSpec here, but instead I will give you some ideas how to improve your specs quality and increase efficiency of your BDD workflow.

"here’s the easy way to get nearly all of those Non-ARC enabled libraries working within your ARC enabled projects."

Table view Hello, World exercise.

XML. Argh, my eyes...

Design tear-down of Path

"Last week the new Path 2 app was released with a bunch of great UI tweaks, which I promise we will definitely see in other apps really soon.

One of the most impressive one to me was the info panel attached to the scroll view indicator which appears as you begin scrolling and disappears after the scroll view stops.



In contrast to the existing table view sections the info panel approach is non-persistent. It allows you to temporarily group data in a table view. Therefore it is not qualified to simply replace every table view section in your app, but it could be a good alternative or even an addition in some cases. So let’s dive into one possible solution I’ve figured out how to create an attached info panel."

JsFiddle is a playground for web developers, a tool which may be used in many ways. One can use it as an online editor for snippets build from HTML, CSS and JavaScript. The code can then be shared with others, embedded on a blog, etc. Using this approach, JavaScript developers can very easily isolate bugs. We aim to support all actively developed frameworks - it helps with testing compatibility.

For anyone who’s developed exclusively with UIViews on iOS may take the title of this post a bit oddly. “WHAT?!” they might say, “Are you insane? Core Graphics is not only a C-only API, but has confusing function names, and needs way more code to do the same thing I can do in less code in UIView”.  Yes, they might be right, but there’s a reason why Core Graphics exists. It’s FAST!

But using Core Graphics doesn’t mean that your code has to be confusing, or that you have to compromise flexibility for performance. You can have your cake and eat it too (aka you can have high-performing code that is easy to read). Read on to see what I mean.

Cocos2D is a powerful library for the iPhone that can save you a lot of time while building your iPhone game. It has sprite support, cool graphical effects, animations, physics libraries, sound engines, and a lot more.

This tutorial series will walk you through the process of creating a simple game for your iPhone with Cocos2D, from start to finish. You can follow along with the series, or just jump straight to the sample project at the end of the article. And yes. There will be ninjas.

This linked list of over 350 free science fiction stories and novels in Amazon's permanent collection was recently updated with hundreds of works from famous science fiction writers who wrote in the 1950's and 1960's and apparently forgot to extend their copyright protection. For the more recent authors SciFi fans will be familiar with, I just list the links (arranged by author) that will take you to their titles in the Kindle store for free download. For the earlier writers, I usually include a one or two line summary of their books.

Foresight's Horizon Scanning Centre has built this toolkit: Exploring the future: Tools for strategic thinking for anyone who uses, or would like to use, futures thinking and analysis to make better decisions today.

The toolkit is intended for futures analysts, policy-makers, strategists and people managing a futures process.

NyARToolkit is an augmented reality toolkit built with 100% pure Java. It is derived from ARToolkit-2.72.1. Like Processing itself it’s open source and free! In this tutorial you will learn how to use it to place computer generated imagery correctly onto real world footage. To do this in real-time NyArtoolkit uses markers – black and white images – to determine the three-dimensional position and orientation in the real world. Most likely you will have seen something like this before, but now you will learn how to do it yourself using freely available software.

For the past few months I've been touting a presentation around the BBC entitled 'How we make websites'. It's a compendium of everything our team has learned from long years developing /programmes, the recent work on /music and the currently in development /events.

Sure, you’ve been developing on iPhone for 6 months now, but do you *really* understand auto-rotation?

Ever seen strange edge-cases where it doesn’t quite seem to behave as expected?

Ever wondered why UINavigationController and UITabBarController seem to “break” auto-rotation of your custom views – views that work fine if you copy/paste them into a fresh XCode project?

In this post, I’ll cover just the very basics: making a non-rotating app rotate, and examining all the side-effects – and some of the workarounds for them.

Recently, Apple introduced several new developer stuff including Xcode 4, ARC, LLVM Compiler 3.0 and iOS 5. From some of the questions on Stack overflow, I could understand that, most of the ARC related confusions arise due to the fact that, developers don’t know if “ABC” is a feature/restriction of LLVM 3.0 or iOS 5 or ARC.
Retain cycles, auto-release pools, @autorelease blocks, oh man! So many new things? What am I going to do? You are right. ARC, or Objective-C Automatic Reference Counting is almost as magical as the iPad. No really!
In this post, I’ve made an attempt to demystify the air around this.

The commons of a Internet of things

"Many articles discuss the power of sketching and why you should do it, but they don’t go into the how or the methods involved. Sketching seems straightforward, but there are certain ways to do it effectively. In this article, we’ll cover a collection of tools and techniques that I (and many other UX and design folks) use every day."

All the power of Haml, Compass and Coffeescript, in your WordPress theme. Stop writing themes like it's 1998.

"These templates and resources appear in our book Communicating the user experience: A practical guide to producing UX Documentation"

Collection of iOS design patterns / UI inspiration sites

Online documentation for CSS. Does what it says on the tin, really...

"BAMEasyTable is a subclass of UITableViewController that makes it easy to implement powerful tables in your app with minimal coding. This post explains how to use BAMEasyTable."

"Jasmine is a behavior-driven development framework for testing your JavaScript code. It does not depend on any other JavaScript frameworks. It does not require a DOM. And it has a clean, obvious syntax so that you can easily write tests."

"Tangle is a JavaScript library for creating reactive documents. Your readers can interactively explore possibilities, play with parameters, and see the document update immediately. Tangle is super-simple and easy to learn."

"Bootstrap is a toolkit from Twitter designed to kickstart development of webapps and sites.
It includes base CSS and HTML for typography, forms, buttons, tables, grids, navigation, and more.

Nerd alert: Bootstrap is built with Less and was designed to work out of the gate with modern browsers in mind."

"One of the complaints about Ruby on Rails that I hear most often is its complexity, despite all the video tutorials showing how easy it is to build a simple application in 5 minutes. In reality, Rails was a huge paradigm shift for web application development and even with its complexity it's a great platform.

I've spent the better part of the last 6 years writing applications using Ruby on Rails and people often ask me for my perspective on how to bootstrap an application and best practices for using Rails. I also see a lot of people getting lost in the noise of scaffolding and complicated tutorials.

That's why I decided to write an example application using Ruby on Rails 3.1. The application is on Github to make it easy to get to, and takes advantage of source code control features like branches so you can follow along as the application gains functionality."

Matatino is a Cocoa framework for Mac that provides a straight-forward way to communicate with your Arduino through its serial connection. To get started, visit our tutorial on how to add Matatino to your Xcode project!

Matatino was developed by RobotGrrl. Matatino uses AMSerialPort (with modifications from xcode-arduino-serial-communication). Matatino was based off of xcode-arduino-serial-communication.

"Now that Lion’s out, people want their SSD TRIM support back. So, here’s the proper way to enable TRIM support."

"What’s Rack?

In the words of the author of Rack – Christian Neukirchen: Rack aims to provide a minimal API for connecting web servers supporting Ruby (like WEBrick, Mongrel etc.) and Ruby web frameworks (like Rails, Sinatra etc.).

Web frameworks such as Sinatra are built on top of Rack or have a Rack interface for allowing web application servers to connect to them.

The premise of Rack is simple – it just allows you to easily deal with HTTP requests."

"We’ll cover how to set up Xcode to use three different unit testing frameworks:
OCUnit, which is the unit testing framework built into Xcode
GHUnit, which is a third party framework with some extra cool features
OCMock, which helps you write mock objects to aid tricky testing scenarios"

"I just finished a short-term iOS project where I used TDD (Test Driven Development) techniques to good advantage. I know I ended up with a cleaner design and better code than I would have otherwise.

I am not a TDD expert, nor am I a TDD purist, but I wanted to share my experience and lessons learned while it was fresh. Hopefully this will encourage other developers to add more testing to their development diet."

"We will explore TDD in this tutorial by developing a simple iPhone app that plays Tic-Tac-Toe. Because our focus is on TDD, we will spend most of our time learning how to think in a “test first” manner."

Here’s a unique idea, create a control that embeds a UITableView within a UIAlertView – SBTableAlert does just that.

List of fonts available in iOS5

"One of the problems that an iOS developer will often face is the performance of table view cells. Table view cells are loaded on-demand by the UITableView that they’re a part of; the system calls ‑cellForRowAtIndexPath: on the table view’s dataSource property to fetch a new cell in order to display it. Since this method is called (several times) while scrolling a table view, it needs to be very performant. You don’t have very much time to provide the system with a table view cell; take too long, and the application will appear to stutter to your users. This kills the immersion of your application and is an instant sign to users that the application is poorly-written. I guess what I’m saying is that this code needs to be fast. But what if something you need to do to display the table view cell takes a long time—say, loading an image?

In my MobiDevDay presentation a couple of weeks ago, I illustrated a solution to this problem: Grand Central Dispatch. GCD, Apple’s new multiprocessing API in Mac OS X Snow Leopard and iOS 4, is the perfect solution for this problem. Let’s take a look at how it works."

"I’ve just released a new little helper library for iOS development. It’s called JMWhenTapped. It’s is a simple little syntactical-sugar addition to all UIView objects, as well as any class that inherits from UIView. It allows you to assign touch-up, touch-down, and tapped (touched down then up) actions to a UIView object using a convenient blocks-style syntax."

"Over the past four months, I've been using Omnigraffle as my go-to diagramming app. During that time, I've collected a small set of tricks that make wireframing and diagramming easier.

If you're a grizzled 'graffle veteran or someone who reads manuals, some of these might be old hat. But maybe not – so check them out. If you've got any of your own, post them in the comments."

Date formatting strings for NSDate

"The following is a simple solution to the problem often encountered in computer graphics, determining whether or not a point (x,y) lies inside or outside a 2D polygonally bounded plane. This is necessary for example in applications such as polygon filling on raster devices. hatching in drafting software, and determining the intersection of multiple polygons."

"NeatGrid is a free online tool for UI designers to quickly create pixel-perfect grid images."