Tag Archives: project

Best Books of 2010

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It is that time of the year again, just like in previous years. This is the list of the books I enjoyed most in 2010! You know that I like reading at least 6 books per year, and learning a new programming language every year. Last year’s programming language was LISP, and the books, well, here they go.

eBooks

By all means, it is clear that 2010 was the year of the eBook. Maybe it’s because of the iPad, but I’ve been consuming more and more eBooks, even if I still enjoy buying some classics in paper form. Kindle, iPad, iBooks, Nook, GoodReader, PDF, ePub, all of those names have shaped my way of reading last year.

But one of the most visible changes of switching to eBooks was the speed of reading; consuming eBooks is fast, much faster than reading normal books. I can’t say that I prefer one or the other; it’s simply different. But reading eBooks is faster than reading paper books. Probably there’s a warmth factor in paper books, which makes me enjoy them longer, I don’t know, but the fact is, in 2010 my book reading consumption has gone up in an alarming rate. Continue reading →

Best Books of 2009

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047014873X.jpg Every year I’m doing the same post (well, in 2006 I completely forgot to do it) that starts more or less with the same phrase: “every year I like to read at least 6 new tech books, and to learn a new programming language.”

Last year’s language was Go, and the books, well, here we go:

Software Engineering: Barry W. Boehm’s Lifetime Contributions to Software Development, Management, and Research

Barry Boehm is a name that might not strike a chord immediately, but if you work in the software field, it should. He has been working non-stop for the past 50 years (that’s right, 50), discussing all kind of subjects related to the practice of software engineering. This book is a compilation of his most well-known papers, with subjects ranging from project management to components, from iterative techniques to developer productivity. The guy has written about all of it, and when you realize how right he was, you wish you had read those papers earlier in your career. Continue reading →

Using Multiple Twitter Clients from your iPhone Application

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I love playing with iPhone URL schemes. And if you ask me, just like for Mail.app and Safari, I think there should be a “default” Twitter client URL scheme in the iPhone, with an interface in the Settings application allowing you to set the application that you prefer to tweet. Alas, this is not the case, and each application must manually allow users to select their preferred client, from a list of known ones.

Having documented iPhone URL schemes for TwitterFon, Twitterrific, Tweetie and Twittelator, I’ve created a project, available in Github, called TwitThis, which helps users choose their preferred Twitter client, and makes it easy to remember the user choice, and to launch the associated application with a single command:

TwitThis

This application has the following features:

  • The class TwitterClientManager loads a list list of supported Twitter clients is loaded from a plist file, which can be extended to support more clients in the future;
  • Each Twitter client is represented by an instance of the TwitterClient class;
  • The user can choose his preferred Twitter client at any time, and launch the application by a simple touch; the TwitterClientManager class stores the selected value in the user settings.

If you have to support several different Twitter clients, feel free to use these classes in your own project! The project, as usual, is available in Github with a liberal BSD license. Enjoy! I’d love to hear your comments below.

Discovering a Hidden iPhone URL Scheme

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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.

xcode

However, not all editors document the URL schemes they support in their apps, and this blocks reuse and collaboration. I recently came into such a problem, trying to use TwitterFon from my own apps, to post messages to Twitter. The TwitterFon site only specifies the following iPhone URL scheme:

twitterfon:///post?this%20is%20a%20test

The problem is, this URL scheme does not perform an URL-decoding on the message parameter, which means that a phrase like “this is a test” will appear in TwitterFon URL-encoded, that is, as “this%20is%20a%20test”. Clearly not acceptable.

However, thanks to Ashley Mills, I learnt that the USA Today iPhone app is able to use TwitterFon to share articles via Twitter, and does this properly, without URL-encoded characters. How do they do that? Obviously, they are using an URL scheme exported by TwitterFon, but not documented anywhere (*). I finally discovered that the URL scheme sought is the following (“message” instead of “post”!):

twitterfon:///message?some%20text%20here

This is how I found out: I impersonated TwitterFon in my own iPhone with an ad-hoc app created in Xcode, that shows me the URL used by USA Today to launch TwitterFon. Continue reading →

Random Quotes on Business and Software

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A Cooperative Organization:

(…) Gore has been a team-based, flat lattice organization that fosters personal initiative. There are no traditional organizational charts, no chains of command, nor predetermined channels of communication. Instead, we communicate directly with each other and are accountable to fellow members of our multi-disciplined teams. We encourage hands-on innovation, involving those closest to a project in decision making. Teams organize around opportunities and leaders emerge.

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

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(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 of us, the ibtool utility bundled with Interface Builder and Xcode allows us to inspect the contents of NIB files (or XIBs, for that matter) and get from them nice property lists XML streams, which I transform in NSDictionary instances, which I loop over and over util I get something that looks like this:

[source:c] UIView *view6 = [[UIView alloc] initWithFrame:CGRectMake(0.0, 0.0, 320.0, 460.0)]; view6.frame = CGRectMake(0.0, 0.0, 320.0, 460.0); view6.alpha = 1.000; view6.autoresizingMask = UIViewAutoresizingFlexibleWidth | UIViewAutoresizingFlexibleHeight; view6.backgroundColor = [UIColor colorWithWhite:0.750 alpha:1.000]; view6.clearsContextBeforeDrawing = NO; // …

UIButton *view9 = [UIButton buttonWithType:UIButtonTypeRoundedRect]; view9.frame = CGRectMake(167.0, 65.0, 72.0, 37.0); view9.adjustsImageWhenDisabled = YES; view9.adjustsImageWhenHighlighted = YES; view9.alpha = 1.000; view9.autoresizingMask = UIViewAutoresizingFlexibleRightMargin | UIViewAutoresizingFlexibleBottomMargin; view9.clearsContextBeforeDrawing = NO; view9.clipsToBounds = NO; view9.contentHorizontalAlignment = UIControlContentHorizontalAlignmentCenter; // … [view9 setTitleShadowColor:[UIColor colorWithWhite:0.000 alpha:1.000] forState:UIControlStateSelected];

// … [view6 addSubview:view9]; // … [/source]

Using this tool, I can now use IB for design, and then generate the code for those designs, in case I prefer to use a code-only approach (usually for UITableViewCells, as I explained before). For the moment it only works with UIKit classes, but I don’t think it might be a problem to extend it to AppKit classes as well.

I hope this project is useful to all of you! As usual, open source, public domain and on Github.

Update, 2009-04-09: This project has been featured in an article in Ars Technica by Erica Sadun!

Asynchronous Loading of Images in a UITableView

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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 the apps (or songs) are downloaded one by one, as you scroll the table, without crashing nor opening 1000 simultaneous network connections.

My solution (there might be many others!) consists in the following key elements:

  • Avoid loading images right after the RSS feed is parsed; instead, use the -tableView:willDisplayCell:forRowAtIndexPath: delegate method in the controller to trigger the loading of the image for cells that become visible; this ensures that only the cells that are visible will receive the order to load images from the network;
  • Use a “model” class for each element of the table, and make the custom UITableViewCell subclass a delegate of this model object; then, the model object is responsible of loading its own image, and will tell the UITableViewCell when done;
  • Use the ASIHTTPRequest framework, with a shared download queue in the application delegate, so that all of the requests are properly queued, and network resources are properly used;
  • Show feedback to the user with scrolling wheels whenever and wherever appropriate;
  • Use the Reachability class from Apple’s own sample code to see if we’re really connected to Flickr, and otherwise show an error to the user.

I have created a sample project, as usual in Github, where I gather RSS data from Flickr’s public feed, and then I download synchronously the preview images of the feed. I even included a very simple Core Animation effect which reminds me of how the iTunes iPhone application allows us to hear previews of the songs we want to buy (the image flips and shows another view “behind”).

Feel free to contribute, fork, enjoy, read, use in your own projects, as you want. As I said, there might be many other (and most probably better) approaches to do this, so feel free to leave your comments below, as usual.

Going Github

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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 thing it lacks, in my opinion, is a bug & issue tracker as you have in Google Code repositories, but other than that, it’s simply perfect.

So feel free to check out the projects I’ve moved there, and of course, to fork them and enjoy the code as you see fit.

Objective-C REST Client Update

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I’ve uploaded (yet another) update to the Objective-C REST client I’ve blogged about previously. This time I’ve scanned the code with the excellent LLVM/Clang Static Analyzer and fixed a couple of memory leaks here and there. I strongly recommend to scan your own projects with this tool, it’s extremely simple to use:

  1. Install it somewhere in your PATH;
  2. Set your projects to use the Debug configuration when building from the command line (you can do that in the inspector for the project, in the “Configurations” tab); (see Sebastien’s comment below ;)
  3. Open Terminal.app and fire
    scan-build -k -V xcodebuild
    on the root of the Xcode project folder;
  4. If there are any problems with your code, you’ll have your web browser pop up with the list of problems, their description in annotated code format, and even a link to open the file right away.

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