Cocoa Manifest

Your Move, Apple

2012-02-22T21:48:00-05:00

The Verge has a great summary of the ABC Nightline special on Foxconn and Apple’s audit by the Fair Labor Association.

GPUImage Framework

2012-02-21T08:29:00-05:00

The prolific Brad Larson released his new GPUImage Framework. While Core Image on iOS 5 gives you a lot of neat capabilities, you’re unable to use custom filters with it at the moment, and of course you’re out of luck if you still need to support iOS 4.

That’s where GPUImage comes in. Brad’s done all the dirty work to wrap video and image processing up in an easy to use library. You can write your own custom filters in the OpenGL Shading Language and just load them in as strings at runtime.

He’s included some great sample code of the filtering on real time video. I’ve seen demos of his work when he presented at SecondConf in the past. He knows his stuff.

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So, How Much Will It Cost To Build This App?

2012-02-19T09:45:00-05:00

Kent Nguyen shares his reasoning why app development takes longer than we think.

Converting an iPhone app to iPhone/iPad universal app: This is the worst ‘additional feature’ found in iPhone development contracts. Because an iPad app is not a frikin’ additional feature. The iPad app is always more complex than iPhone app, and most of the time requires entirely different interface and interaction mechanism. It’s like making an electric bicycle and then convert it to a fuel-powered motorcyle! They are very similar at what they do, but under the hood, the difference is immense.

Keep this page on speed dial for the next client that wants a “Path-like” social network app for poodle lovers built in a week for $1,000 and a box of pizza.

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Time To Rethink Your Class Design

2012-02-18T09:28:00-05:00

Matthijs Hollemans gives a writeup on keeping your App Delegate lean and free of cruft, unlike the way the old Xcode templates used to do.

So if you feel tempted to write,

[UIApplication sharedApplication].delegate

anywhere in your code, then it’s time to rethink your class design.

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More Common Ground

2012-02-17T01:04:00-05:00

Just posted by Kenneth Reitz:

This is an incredible day for the Homebrew community. You can now setup a complete OS X develop environment with a single 171.7 MB package download. It’s official. It’s legal. It’ll be maintained.

Homebrew is going to officially support the package too.

I found this while trying to get Homebrew to work after updating to the freshly released Xcode 4.3 downloaded from the App Store.

Apple goes on record to support Homebrew. Curiouser and curiouser.

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Common Ground

2012-02-16T23:29:00-05:00

Panic, on Apple’s Gatekeeper in OS X Mountain Lion:

In recent years, Apple has shown a trend of following the most hardline possible stance that will benefit users and Apple, often at the expense of developer freedom, and gradually backing in certain affordances (push notifications, for example) as user-impacting problems became evident. So it seemed feasible that we’d wake up one day and Apple would decree that all Mac apps must be sold through the App Store.

But instead, Apple went to considerable effort and expense to find a middle ground.

Gatekeeper seems like an interesting compromise. It’s much more liberal than I expected. What’s more surprising, though, is that Apple invited Panic out to have a preview of the feature. And given that Phil Schiller himself gave a private demo of Mountain Lion to John Gruber, I’m quite curious to know more about the direction Apple is going.

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Hacking and Securing iOS Applications (Book)

2012-02-16T09:15:00-05:00

You need to read this book by Jonathan Zdziarski. Even if you’re not working on a project that handles highly sensitive data, you’ll be amazed how easy it is to hack into a locked iPhone and extract quite a bit of data if you have physical access to the device. It’s a great book to learn about the low level internals. And you’ll be better prepared with techniques to minimize exposure of private information.

iOS is a juicy target for those hunting effective exploits. This can help you get into the mindset of someone wanting to attack your users through your software.

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The JSON Saga

2012-02-15T23:19:00-05:00

Douglas Crockford walks through how he discovered JSON and how it changed our world.

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NSScreencast

2012-02-15T10:35:00-05:00

Ben Scheirman has started NSScreencast, a collection of frequent screencasts that looks to be the equivalent of RailsCasts over in the Ruby world. It’s a great idea and I hope it takes off.

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Tale of an iOS Freelancer

2012-02-14T08:52:00-05:00

All you need to be a millionaire is an iPhone SDK installed on your Mac, right? Right?!?!

If you have yet to wake up from reality’s cold water splash bath, read Matthijs Hollemans one year retrospective on going independent. He discusses how to find real work, get paid what you’re worth, build your knowledge, and team up with the right people. He’s one of the tutorial writers over at the excellent raywenderlich.com, an unusually excellent repository of stuff to help beginners on iOS find their way.

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