Del.icio.us to WordPress

Date Arrow  December 28, 2009

I’ve just uploaded a new project on Github called delicious_wp: it’s a small Ruby script that simply fetches the items stored in del.icio.us the previous week and creates a blog post with them. You can set up a small cron job to execute this script every week, which is what I’ve done for this blog [...]

Tagged   Blogs · Code · Open SourceComments  Add Your Comment 

Thoughts about Google’s “Go” Programming Language

Date Arrow  November 12, 2009

Historically, we can distinguish really big software companies for providing, at least, four major kinds of products: an operating system (sometimes open sourced at a certain level), a web browser (with various degrees of standard compliance), a suite of office applications (slightly compatible with everyone else’s), and a programming language with curly brackets (generally incompatible [...]

Tagged   Code · Open Source · SoftwareComments  Add Your Comment (7)

Discovering a Hidden iPhone URL Scheme

Date Arrow  August 4, 2009

As an iPhone developer, one of the simplest and easiest mechanisms you have to interact with other applications is through the use of iPhone URL Schemes. These are so important that I’ve created a wiki page where I keep track of those I come across, including code samples that help me exchange data with them.

However, [...]

Tagged   Code · Software · iPhoneComments  Add Your Comment (2)

Code Organization in Xcode Projects

Date Arrow  July 28, 2009

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 [...]

Tagged   Architecture · Code · Opinion · iPhoneComments  Add Your Comment (3)

Objective-C Compiler Warnings

Date Arrow  July 16, 2009

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 [...]

Tagged   Code · Opinion · Quality · iPhoneComments  Add Your Comment (14)

NIBs or code? Why not both? Here’s nib2objc.

Date Arrow  March 17, 2009

(Somehow this project seems to me so simple, that I’m sure someone has done this before. Anyway). This is my feeble attempt to bring an answer to the eternal dichotomy between those arguing about the relative benefits of creating user interfaces via Interface Builder or via pure Objective-C code: let me introduce nib2objc.
Unbeknown to most [...]

Tagged   Cocoa · Code · iPhoneComments  Add Your Comment (7)

That iPhone Keypad

Date Arrow  March 13, 2009

Finishing my series of copied flattered UIs, like that Facebook thingy or that Twitterriffic gadget, here’s Apple’s own iPhone keyboard, in a really sloppy implementation that has been blatantly and horribly copied, with awful sounds that pop when you tap the numbers and such. The Fring iPhone application uses a similar keyboard, but with [...]

Tagged   Apple · Code · iPhoneComments  Add Your Comment 

Asynchronous Loading of Images in a UITableView

Date Arrow  March 8, 2009

This is one of the most common scenarios for network- + UITableView-based applications; a UITableView instance whose contents come from the network; not only the text, but also the images! Somehow we all want to reproduce the behavior of the App Store (or of the iTunes) iPhone application, where the icons (or covers) of [...]

Tagged   Code · Open Source · iPhoneComments  Add Your Comment (18)

That Twitterriffic editor

Date Arrow  February 28, 2009

They say imitation is the best form of flattery. Well, here’s another attempt at doing that, after my “attack” on the Facebook iPhone app (decidedly I’m on a somewhat copying mood lately).
I use Twitterriffic a lot, both on the iPhone and on my Mac, and particularly in the iPhone version, I’ve always liked [...]

Tagged   Cocoa · Code · iPhoneComments  Add Your Comment (5)

Going Github

Date Arrow  February 18, 2009

This is something I’ve been looking forward to do for some time. After praising git back in 2007, now I’m moving many of my personal projects to Github, which has an absolutely brilliant service! For the moment I’m using the free account, but I will most probably switch to a paid account soon. The only [...]

Tagged   Code · OpinionComments  Add Your Comment