Cocoa Is My Girlfriend

Our Core Animation book should be available by the end of the year. Go ahead and pre-order it now at Amazon if you would like ;-). When we started writing for Addison-Wesley back in September of 2008, I had no idea how long to expect it to take to finish a technical book as this was my first. One thing I discovered though, is that it is when you are about ready to go to production you start to realize all of the things that you probably should have added to the book, but didn’t think of in time. This blog post will cover one such item as a way to make up for not thinking of it in time. I may include this in a second edition if there is one, but consider this one a freebie. Read more

If your app is fullscreen, like a game, has a presentation mode, or plays long running movie files, you’ll want to disable the display from sleeping. DVD Player and Keynote are perhaps the two most obvious examples of this functionality. Read more

At first glance setting a height dynamically for table view cells seems a little daunting and the first most obvious answers that come to mind are not necessarily correct. In this post I will show you how to set your table view cell heights dynamically based upon the text content without subclassing UITableViewCell. You can subclass it, however, doing so does not make the code much cleaner as setting the height is done in your delegate for the table view itself rather than the cell anyhow. Read on to see what you need to know to make dynamic cell height sizing a breeze. Read more

October 17th and October 18th of this year, the Voices That Matter conference will be occurring in Boston. I will be speaking at this conference on the subject of Core Animation. In addition to myself, there is a very nice list of speakers at this conference including Aaron Hillegass, Daniel Jalkut, Fraser Speirs and many others.

Early Signup

Currently, you can get $200.00 off the the price of the conference if you sign up before the 12th of September.

In addition, if you use the speaker code ‘PHASPKR’, you can receive an additional $150.00 off the price. That is a combined discount of $350.00 if you sign up before September 12th.

http://www.voicesthatmatter.com/iphone2009/

It is important to develop a consistent build process for your applications. I have written a couple of bash scripts to help me with this process.

I use git for version control and also the services of github. Now in another post on this site Marcus covered how to put git commit checksums in your Info.plist’s CFBundleVersion. I have opted to use Apple Generic Versioning (or agv for short) instead as it has an easy to read incrementing build number and is super easy to script. It’s also great for use with Sparkle since Sparkle uses the CFBundleVersion to see if the appcast has a newer version. Read more

I’ve seen a good bit of sample code that shows how to implement using a UINavigationController in a view controller that is managed by a UITabBarController, but I haven’t seen much on how to do it with Interface Builder. Turns out that it’s pretty simple and I’m going to show you how. Read more

This is the first in a short series on my adventures getting my software out the door. Rather than this first lesson be a lesson in what to do, here’s what not to do. Read more

Update: This is documented behavior.

Every now and again while doing development you stumble upon something that makes you go, hmmmm. Those are normally the moments at which you have to ask yourself, “is this a bug or a feature”. If it’s a bug, then you should file a radar with Apple, however, what if it’s a feature? You blog about it, of course!

I have done a bit less iPhone development than Marcus, so he was a little stumped while looking through some of my code where I created a view controller using a simple alloc/init. Most interestingly is that fact that the app works. It loads the correct nib and displays the view just fine without any trouble. Notice I said alloc/init and not alloc/initWithNibName. How can this possibly work? How did my controller “know” which view to use? Read more

Having finally decided that I prefer the 1920×1200 display of the 17″ Macbook Pros I am finally committing to one size of laptop. To help force myself into that commitment I am going to be selling my gently used late 2008 15″ Macbook Pro.

The specs are:

• 2.53 Ghz Intel Core Duo
• 4GB RAM
• 320 GB Harddrive
• 512 Nvidia Video cards (9400 and 9600)
• 2 USB
• 1 FW/800

All of the original hardware and equipment are included.

The asking price is $1,800.00 plus shipping.

The machine is in perfect condition as shown in these photos on flickr (http://tr.im/kQ11).

If you are interested in this machine please contact me at marcus at cimgf dot com.

Thanks to the ability to have configurations in a Core Data Managed Object Model and being able to save data to multiple Persistent Stores, it is possible to have a Core Data Model that is constructed from not only an internal model, but from the models of all the plug-ins that are loaded into the application.

In this example we are going to build a basic application with the following requirements:

• A plug-in framework
• Plug-ins can extend the managed object model of the application
• Removal of a plug-in should not corrupt the persistent store.

Read more

I am happy to confirm that I will be at WWDC this year in San Francisco. I am making this trip a little tighter, time-wise than I have in the past so I will be arriving on Sunday, June 7th and leaving on June 13th.

I normally post my nighttime plans on twitter (@mzarra) so if you are interested in having a chat then that is the best way to track me down. I will also be tweeting which sessions I am going to throughout the day.

I look forward to seeing everyone there, it should be very interesting as always.

In some recent discussions I have been shocked to realize that many developers treat DEBB as gospel. This is a terrible idea. DEBB is written by people like me and I am a moron.

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As part of working with the print world I occasionally have to actually print something out. Publishers like to have paper copies of contracts, tax documents, etc. Its a pain in the rear and outdated but a necessary evil at this point.

One such occasion happened today and I needed to mail out a new signed contract to THe Pragmatic Programmers. As luck would have it, I lost my aging copy of Mail Factory, an app that prints nice mailing labels, since the last time I needed to print a label. No big deal, I went to their website and tried to download a new copy. Since the last time I used it, about a year ago, they have cancelled that product and rebranded it Labels & Addresses. Still no big deal, I downloaded the new application and recreated my label.

When I went to print the label I saw in the preview window that they printed “trial version” on the label. Ok, now this is starting to get annoying. If you are going to let me demo the software, let me demo it! Don’t put trial version on the very first label I try to print!

I took a deep breath, remembered that I have been using their software for many years now and decided to just buy a license. They even took my old license in and gave me a discount. Blood pressure dropped, things were fine. Then I ran into their payment processor — Digital River.

I am stunned, stunned, that anyone is still using these thieves! Immediately they try to charge me a “license backup” fee which is an Opt-Out. Annoyed, I opt out of that. On the payment page I have a choice for PayPal. Surprise, there is a $3.50 “manual processing fee” for PayPal. This is NOT 1998! Still, I wanted to print a pretty label so I back out, add a credit card and hit process. I am then presented with this:

Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

Did my order go through or not? Who knows? I check my credit card provider, no charge. But are they slow or did it fail?

I contact the software vendor but they are only open until noon EST. Guess I will find out tomorrow or the next day since their site claims they strive to respond within 1-2 days. A happy customer this does not make.

Advice

Do not do this to your customers. Stop using these payment processing services that charge you insane amounts of money and screw your customers over. Spend a day (yes it only takes ONE day) and write your own that links to Google or PayPal. Or just use E-Junkie like I do. This is a customer facing system. When you bend your customers over with additional fees, cryptic error messages and other junk, they are not going to come back to you and say “please sir I would like some more”.

Also, respond to customer email within 24 hours. Don’t let it sit. Don’t give your customers a 7 hour window per day that you handle email. This is just bad.

My Solution

I deleted their software, will be asking for a refund (IF they ever charge me) and I wrote the label by hand. I will not be going back to them any time in the future for any of their software unless they stop using Digital River.

Every once in a while I find a way to combine multiple technologies that, while they don’t produce anything terribly useful, are very interesting when combined. In this post I will be taking a look at combining Core Animation and QuickTime. As you may or may not be aware, you can draw in a graphics context while your Core Animation animation is running and add each image created to a QTMovie object from QTKit. This enables you to create a QuickTime movie of your Core Animation animation. Here’s how. Read more

Every once in a while I run across a situation that just amazes me. While this topic is not strictly about software development it is about the subject of the business of software.

Our customers give us money for something we have already written.

This is an important point to grasp. We write software once and sell it many times over with no production costs other than initial development. Unlike almost every other industry in the world we only have to write the software once! We do not have to produce something new every time a customer wants to purchase something from us.

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