App developers need ways to promote their apps and audio and video provide a way to do that. At a recent iOS developer camp in Colorado I gave a talk in which I demonstrated some ways developers can create their own creative content like audio and video in-house. In one segment I demonstrated a technique that I refer to as creating a Happy Appy Song. What is it, you ask. You’ve heard it. It’s a happy sounding fanciful tune that plays in the background as some narrator describes the wonders and benefits of an app (or other product for that matter). The basic premise of the happy appy song is that, first of all, it’s easy to create, but second there’s a simple formula. Here is all you need:

1. A happy chord progression in a major key
2. A simple drumbeat
3. A glockenspiel sound

And now I present to you, Creating a Happy Appy Song

I tweeted a call for help today to figure out how to get crash logs from a device that syncs with iCloud rather than with iTunes and a cable. The issue is that you can only sync with one and not both and switching between them willy nilly can be perilous unless you enjoy losing your data just for the fun of it.

Several responses suggested taking things into my own hands by rolling my own logging mechanism when building an app I intend to ship. I think this is likely the approach I will take in the future, however, it doesn’t help my immediate problem. How do I get crash logs from an app I already shipped that is running on client’s device not physically located near me? Here’s a summary of what people suggested. Drill down in the settings app and copy the contents of the crash log like this (click/tap to enlarge):

Then, paste that into an email:

Then you can send the crash log to any email address you specify.

It certainly is not a pretty approach, but it will get the job done.

Thanks to the folks who responded to my call for help, @davidiom, @therealkerni, @thenighttrader, and @rckoenes. I appreciate it!

I’ve been using StackOverflow nearly since it started back in 2008. I remember when it first started there didn’t seem to be much going on and so I forgot about it for a time. Then, one day, while searching the interwebs for an answer to a programming question, SO was the first hit in my search results. At that point I went back and started using it regularly–not only to find answers, but to offer my own experiences and expertise to help others. It’s a great site and I have nothing but high praise for its founders, Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky. The entire StackExchange network is an impressive engineering achievement. (more…)

It seems like a pretty useful feature, anonymous image file upload in iOS with imgur. If you need to upload images and don’t want to fool with some authentication mess like OAuth this technique is perfect. There are libraries that have simplified the OAuth process, however, it’s nice to be able to just initiate an upload, get a result URL back and be on your way. No fuss, no muss. That’s what I was looking for, so I wrote a little app that demonstrates how to do exactly that. (more…)

In my Xcode LLDB Tutorial, I mention using the debugger to interrogate data collections. Well, I wanted to elaborate on that idea a little because there are some techniques you can use for querying objective-c data collections that are very powerful.

If you develop apps for clients, you my be one of the lucky ones–the ones who actually get to model your data and use Core Data to store and access it. But I’m betting there are many of you who aren’t the lucky ones–or at least not on all of your projects. From time to time you have to deal with data in whatever format your client gives it to you. Maybe you’ve even suggested taking the CSVs or Plists (or whatever other formats clients have come up with to ruin your life) and actually loading those into Core Data. But they don’t get Core Data and they shoot down the idea. Well, you may want to just walk away from the gig. However, if you’re like me, you’ve got bills to pay and clients (the good ones at least) tend to help you accomplish that. Well, fortunately for us, Objective-C makes dealing with this kind of data manageable using a little technique known as KVC, Key-Value-Coding, with array filtering and sorting.

This is not an advanced topic, so if you’re already familiar with how KVC and array filtering and sorting works, this post may not help you as much. But for those of you who are fairly new to iOS development, you need to know about this magical feature of the language as all the senior iOS developers use it and you should too. (more…)

Developing iOS apps in Xcode is pretty great. With Objective-C and llvm we get type checking and autocompletion of all our classes and method names which is a nice improvement over my favorite dynamic languages. Unfortunately there are still some places where the compiler can’t help us. There are various resources we load from files like images, nibs & xibs and other resources which we need to specify by name, like a view controller we want to load from a storyboard. (more…)

Core Data and NSFetchedResultsController do clever things under-the-hood to improve performance, such as loading data in batches as it’s needed. But there’s a gotcha with grouping data with sectionNameKeyPath than can cause a big hit in performance. Check this out. (more…)

Being that I’m a blogger as well as a software developer, I’m going to deviate a little from the normal Cocoa specific programming fare and focus a bit on leveraging basic SEO on your blog. These are some of the lessons I’ve learned and I think they might be helpful to others.

People do some pretty shady things to try to improve their page rank. There are companies who claim to be able to improve page rank. In fact it’s an entire market full of snake oil sales people. I’m sure there are some legitimate “consultants” out there, but they’re tough to find. In the end, the techniques for “optimizing” your page so that search engines find your content more readily are the same for the legit folks, like bloggers such as those of us who write for CIMGF, as they are for the folks who are trying to game the system. The difference is that gaming the system is exactly what true SEO helps eliminate. Google will blacklist your site if they detect you are trying to game them and getting off of that list will prove very difficult. It is not worth it to game the system. In the end when leveraging basic SEO, the old adage remains, “Content is King”. That single principle is the one and only differentiator. Write great content for your users and everything else will fall into place. (more…)

What inspired the Xcode LLDB Tutorial? Well, I tweeted this the other day:

A few people then responded over twitter asking that I would elaborate by writing a tutorial here on CIMGF. So here it is. Your wish is my command, The Xcode LLDB Tutorial

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Since last year I’ve spent a lot of time working on iPad apps for medical device companies. These companies want to be able to display their sales materials/digital assets to potential buyers on the iPad because of its gorgeous presentation. We can’t blame them. This is a great choice especially with the retina display on the third generation iPad. It’s incredibly compelling.

Our go-to solution for presenting these files until recently has been to just load everything into a UIWebView because it supports so many formats. Voila! Done! We like simple solutions to problems that would otherwise be very difficult.

This solution has worked great, but over time it’s become a noticeably dull spot in the app with some UX problems to boot. This is not good–especially for the part of the app that gets the most customer face time. It needs to shine. To go fullscreen, we just load a full size view controller modally. One issue with this approach though was that it only worked in landscape. For some reason it would get wonky (engineering parlance for, “um, I don’t know”) if we allowed both orientations since the rest of the app supported landscape only. It also had a nav bar that would never be hidden, so the user would always see it even when they were scrolling through the document content. Finally, there was no way to jump down deep into a document. If you needed to get to page 325, for example, you had to scroll all the way there. That’s just a bad user experience–incredibly tedious making it unlikely anyone would use it with a large document. These were some significant drawbacks and I didn’t have a good solution to bring the polish that this segment of the app deserved. (more…)

Importing data is a problem that feels like it should have a library of work ready for you to use. Especially when it comes to importing data into Core Data where you have a description of your data to work with. What if there was such a library, or reusable framework, of importing code that basically converts raw data to Core Data entities? Well, wonder no further because in this post, I’ll be discussing a new addition to the MagicalRecord toolset, MagicalImport available now on Github!

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Whether you subscribe to Test Driven Development (TDD) or another testing practice, when it comes automated unit testing with Core Data, things can be a little tricky. But if you keep it simple, and take things step by step, you can get up and running with unit testing using Core Data fairly quickly. We’ll explore the what, how and why of unit testing with Core Data. We’ll also be using the helper library MagicalRecord. MagicalRecord not only lets us get up and running faster, but helps to cut down on the noise in our tests.

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A couple of weeks ago Matt Long was having a problem with an app running out of memory. He had a ginormous data file he needed to load up and process, and that memory hit was more than the app could bear. It would load just fine, into an NSData, but before he could finish with it the app would run short of memory and die.

Until recently the obvious thing would have been to tell NSData to create a memory-mapped instance. Given NSString *path pointing to a file, you could create an NSData with almost no memory hit regardless of file size by creating it as:

NSData *data = [NSData dataWithContentsOfMappedFile:path];

Starting with iOS 5 though, this method has been deprecated. Instead, what you’re supposed to do is:

NSError *error = nil;
NSData *data = [NSData dataWithContentsOfFile:path options:NSDataReadingMappedAlways error:&error];

So, fine, whatever, it’s a different call, so what? Well, it wasn’t working. Instruments was showing that the app was taking the full memory hit when the NSData was created. Mapping wasn’t working despite using NSDataReadingMappedAlways. So what could he do? The wheels of my mind started turning.

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With the March 1st start date approaching when sandboxing becomes a requirement for submissions to the Mac App Store, I’ve been considering my options. (more…)

A few months ago I wrote here about a generic approach to safely take incoming JSON and save values to Core Data object. The goals of that code were twofold:

1. Provide a safe, generic alternative to Cocoa’s -setValuesForKeysWithDictionary: for use with NSManagedObject and its subclasses
2. Handle cases where JSON data didn’t match up with what the managed objects expected. Getting a string where you expect a numeric value, or vice versa, for example, or getting a string representation of a date when you want a real NSDate object.

The first item was the most important. It’s tempting to use -setValuesForKeysWithDictionary: to transfer JSON to a model object in one step. The method runs through the dictionary and calls -setValue:forKey: on the target object for every entry. It has a fatal flaw though, in that it doesn’t check to see if the target object actually has a key before trying to set it. Using this method when you don’t have absolute control over the dictionary contents is an invitation to unknown key exceptions and nasty app crashes.

Fixing this for managed objects was relatively easy because Core Data provides convenient Objective-C introspection methods. The general approach was:

• Get a list of the target object’s attributes
• For each attribute, see if the incoming dictionary has an entry. If so,

• Compare the incoming type to the expected type, and convert if necessary.
• Call -setValue:forKey: with that key and its value.

And then just last week I had the thought, wouldn’t it be nice if this worked for any object, not just for managed objects?

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