My name is Jake Marsh. Inventor š” Founder šØš»āš» Creator šØāš¤ Writer āš» Lifeform š½
Building apps for iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch: UIKit, Core Data, Core Animation, CloudKit and friends. 26 posts.
I suppose itās about time I wrote about Little Bites of Cocoa. Iāve been having a blast with it. Hereās a little about how it came to be: The idea was simple. Daily bite-sized (get it?) tips and tricks to give readers a brief overview or explanation of a particular concept, technique, or tool. Iā¦ Read more of Little Bites of Cocoa š« ā
ComponentKit takes a functional, declarative approach to building UI. It lets you focus on what your UI should look like, not the steps necessary to build it. It emphasizes a one-way data flow from immutable models to immutable components that describe how views should be configured. It does theā¦ Read more of ComponentKit ā
Apple: WatchKit apps have two parts: A WatchKit extension that runs on iPhone and a set of user interface resources that are installed on Apple Watch. When your app is launched on Apple Watch, the WatchKit extension on iPhone runs in the background to update the user interface and respond to userā¦ Read more of Apple Releases First Beta of WatchKit ā
Apple: This document gets you started creating a CloudKit app that stores structured app and user data in iCloud. Using CloudKit, instances of your appālaunched by different users on different devicesāhave access to the records stored in the appās database. Really nice to see Apple going to suchā¦ Read more of CloudKit Quick Start ā
Github: This is an attempt to encourage patterns that accomplish the following goals (in rough priority order): Increased rigor, and decreased likelihood of programmer error Increased clarity of intent Reduced verbosity Fewer debates about aesthetics Some fantastic guidance in here. One of myā¦ Read more of Github's Swift Style Guide ā
The guys at Github have been rocking some awesome Objective-C open-source stuff lately, and their latest release, Mantle, does not disappoint. Mantle makes it easy to write a simple model layer for your Cocoa or Cocoa Touch application. Mantle has theā¦ Read more of Mantle: Objective-C Model Objects That Don't Suck! ā
I often find myself needing to create what I call āstatic contentā UITableViewControllers. Whether it be a āSupportā or āAboutā screen, or possibly a simple āLoginā or āSettingsā screen, I find myself writing a ton of annoying, repetitive, boilerplate codeā¦ Read more of Create Static Content Screens with Ease! ā
Another amazing open-source project from @mattt and the AFNetworking guys: AFIncrementalStore. AFIncrementalStore is an NSIncrementalStore subclass that uses AFNetworking to automatically request resources as properties and relationships are needed. I had noticed NSIncrementalStore in the iOS 5ā¦ Read more of CoreData + AFNetworking = AFIncrementalStore ā
Filling out forms on a phone can really suck. Heck, even on the iPadās awesome screen, I often make plenty of mistakes while typing in information. When a user first downloads your iOS app, itās quite common for them to need to fill out some sort of āsign upā or some other kind of form. All ofā¦ Read more of Delight Your Users By Pre-filling Forms With JBDeviceOwner ā
I canāt tell you how long Iāve been waiting for this. As Joris points out, it appears that Apple has committed the necessary changes to the LLVM project to allow LLVM to fully support the latest Objective-C language features. Apple committed a new patch to the llvm project adding support for newā¦ Read more of Literal Syntax for NSArray, NSDictionary & NSNumber ā
As Iām sure many readers have heard, there has been some public outcry lately on the subject of iOS apps accessing the Address Book contacts of a their users and then sending the whole lot of them off to their servers, to accomplish their āfriend matchingā features. Many companies have alreadyā¦ Read more of Protect Your Users' Privacy With DTSHashedContacts ā
Tom Harrington brings us another insanely valuable little bit of code that does some simple, yet awesome things with a parsed NSDictionary of JSON content: Provide a safe, generic alternative to Cocoaās -setValuesForKeysWithDictionary: for use with NSManagedObject and its subclasses Handle casesā¦ Read more of Parse JSON Directly into NSManagedObjects ā
Fantastic writeup from Fraser Speirs about iOSās multitasking capabilities and behavior. He goes into great detail about the ins and outs of things and covers all the different scenarios really well. The problem is this: If someone tells you that all the apps in the multitasking bar are runningā¦ Read more of Misconceptions About iOS Multitasking ā
Oh man, I wish I had found Tim Oliverās writeup about this sooner (includes diagrams and sample code). I just wrote all of this code myself, and had to do all of my own research. Serves me right for not properly Googling. Pro Tip: Google everything before you begin coding a solution for a problemā¦ Read more of Creating the iOS 5 UITableView Bevel Effect ā
Iām absolutely in love with the technique David Hamrick lays out in this post. Instead of subclassing UIView every time we need to draw something what if we were to have one subclass that allowed us to pass in a block that performed the drawing code. So Iāve created a class called DrawView thatā¦ Read more of Using Blocks for Drawing ā
Hereās a neat little write up (sample code included) from Florian Mielke of how to replicate Path 2.0ās neat behavior of āattachingā a timestamp indicator that follows iOSās built-in scroll indicator as you scroll. The basic idea is to add the info panelās root layer as a sublayer to theā¦ Read more of Attaching a UIView to the UIScrollViewIndicator ā
Hiedi Utley has completely brought the awesome with a way to use desktop Safariās WebKit inspector to debug iOS UIWebView objects: Wow! What a day! While researching debugging techniques for an upcoming training class I am teaching on PhoneGap, I stumbled over a couple of blogs about a private APIā¦ Read more of Remote Debugging UIWebView ā
SNRFetchedResultsController is a āportā (not exactly) of NSFetchedResultsController from iOS to OS X. It is not a drop in replacement for NSFetchedResultsController, but performs many of the same tasks in relation to managing results from a Core Data fetch and notifying a delegate when objects areā¦ Read more of SNRFetchedResultsController ā
Found this article that Drew McCormack put together while searching around for some CoreAnimation techniques this afternoon. It basically covers the process of conceptualizing, imagining, wire framing, designing, implemented, performance tuning and testing a really awesome CoreAnimation interfaceā¦ Read more of Scrapbook of an Advanced Core Animation View ā
From the uber-talented Jeff Broderick comes this beautiful and awesome collection of iOS homescreen shortcuts to the major parts of iOSās settings app. Finally, you can have beautiful, quick ways to get to the parts of Settings.app you use the most. Also make sure to check out Jeff on Dribbbleā¦ Read more of iOS Settings Shortcuts ā
I see this type of stuff a lot in other peopleās code: Objective-C Itās certainly not wrong, but you are incurring a huge performance and memory usage hit just to get the width and height of an image. Enter the CGImageSource... methods. As of iOS 4, the SDK includes a better solution in the formā¦ Read more of Accessing Image Properties Without Loading the Image ā
Been wanting something like this for a long time. GAJavaScript is a Cocoa Touch library that makes working with JavaScript from inside native code much more tolerable, maybe even fun. JavaScript is accessed from Cocoa Touch using UIWebView. GAJavaScript has the concept of a āscript engineā, whichā¦ Read more of GAJavaScript ā
One of the most interesting additions to iOS 5 was iCloud storage which makes it easy to sync data between apps running on different iOS and OS X devices. Effectively you can store key application data in the cloud and have it propagate to all instances of the app wherever they are running. Niceā¦ Read more of Syncing Your App's Preferences with iCloud ā
Iāve just released a new little helper library for iOS development. Itās called JMWhenTapped. Itās is a simple little syntactical-sugar addition to all UIView objects, as well as any class that inherits from UIView. It allows you to assign touch-up, touch-down, and tapped (touched down then up)ā¦ Read more of Save Time and Code With JMWhenTapped ā
Today Iām open-sourcing a small project I use to do remote image downloading and caching on iOS called JMImageCache. It uses an NSCache based remote-image caching mechanism that can be easily integrated into any project. It is very light weight and isnāt meant to be a replacement for UIImageViewā¦ Read more of Introducing: JMImageCache ā
Recently, Iāve been struggling with NSFetchedResultsController. I was trying to get it to section my objects by a āpretty dateā, but still have them sorted properly. Thanks to a great post on stackoverflow, I realized the beauty and simplicity of just adding an Objective-C Category to the NSDateā¦ Read more of Custom Sections Title Selectors ā
