iOS

Faux Pas: Static Error Detection for Xcode Projects

I have been working on an app called Faux Pas for a long time now. It's a static error detection tool for Xcode projects: you point this app to your project, and it'll work through it, trying to find common errors or departures from best practices.

It's been in a long private beta, and now it's time to release it to a wider audience. Find more information from the introductory blog post over at the app's website.

The Compiler is Your Friend

Which compiler warnings should I enable for my iOS/Mac app project? How do I enable warnings that Xcode doesn't have a checkbox for? How do I disable warnings (either completely, for specific files, or in specific sections of code?) Where do I go to find out what warnings are available? How do I enable warnings for my own code, but disable them for third-party code that I compile into my bundle? What about warnings that are triggered in third-party headers?

I did a talk on compiler warnings at the HelsinkiOS/CocoaHeads April 2013 meetup that answers all of the above questions. The slides are available at Speaker Deck, and embedded in this post below.

Handling NSStrings Like a Boss

Strings are arguably the most common data structures used by practicing programmers. They're easy to conceptualize as “sequences of characters,” but it's important to note the leakiness of this abstraction, and to know how (and when) to consider the details of how what we think of as “characters” are represented in modern software.

I did a talk on this topic at the HelsinkiOS/CocoaHeads February 2013 meetup — obviously from the point of view of Apple's platform APIs. The slides are available at Speaker Deck, and embedded in this post below.

iOS & OS X Localization Practicum

I did a talk on the localization of iOS and OS X projects at the HelsinkiOS February 2012 meetup. The slides are available at Speaker Deck, and embedded in this post below.

Use Unicode Emoji as Icons in Native iOS Apps

A while back, I wrote about using unicode emoji characters as icons in web apps. The big caveat with that was that these characters were only available on iOS devices, which made the trick much less useful in a web app, which of course are generally meant to be more or less cross-platform. If you're developing a native iOS app, though, using these standard colorful bitmap emoji characters as icons is a much more realistic proposition, because you can be sure that all the devices your app runs on will have them available. In this post I will show how to easily do this.

Use Unicode Emoji as Image-Free Icons in iOS Web Apps

In version 2.2 of iOS — Apple's "mobile" operating system used in the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad — support for Emoji was added. These small 12x12 pixel icons are meant to be used in text messaging in Japan but because they're implemented simply as unicode symbols in the device they can be used as icons when we know they're available.