tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33176811949762918942012-02-16T12:41:26.967-08:00The official Able Pear Software blog. We like to write about mobile development, iOS, Objective-C and related topics of interest to the tech community. And we post the occasional Able Pear product announcement.Able Pearhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10972026256260166617noreply@blogger.comBlogger315125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3317681194976291894.post-63768656483089695632012-02-16T12:39:00.000-08:002012-02-16T12:41:26.984-08:00

Recently, on the iOS Developer Network (iOS DevNet) on LinkedIn, I posted a discussion on integrating "social media hubs" into your iOS 5 app and provided some references.  Here is the discussion: There are several ways to integrate your app with Social Media hubs like Facebook and Twitter. Now with the new Accounts and Twitter frameworks in iOS 5 Apple makes it even easier. Peter Friese has a

Kevin Bomberryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07977425999974745365noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3317681194976291894.post-19550691693874377112012-01-09T07:01:00.000-08:002012-01-09T07:01:01.013-08:00

With 2012 barely a week old (and possibly the last year ever), I thought it would be a good time to make some prognostications for the tech industry in the year ahead. As an iOS developer, I pay a lot of attention to Apple, so I'll concentrate on what I think is in store for the Cupertino company. Love them or hate them, they're certain to continue to make their presence felt in 2012.iPad

Don McCaugheyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07415126617410591475noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3317681194976291894.post-12443097477361464062012-01-05T07:01:00.000-08:002012-01-05T07:01:00.257-08:00

Years ago as a developer working mostly solo, I got interested in automated testing and unit testing, which in turn lead me to extreme programming (XP) and agile software methodologies. I've had the wonderful good fortune of working for Pivotal Labs a number of times in recent years and been a part of a number of successful agile projects. I know that an agile approach to project management can

Don McCaugheyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07415126617410591475noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3317681194976291894.post-86145550114561804072011-12-08T07:01:00.000-08:002011-12-08T07:01:00.150-08:00

In a series of recent blog posts, John Muchow of iOS Developer Tips shows how to create your own wrapper around NSLog() to add useful debugging information to your log output like file name and line number:Filename and Line Number with NSLog: Part IFilename and Line Number with NSLog: Part IIObjective-C Expressions for DebuggingSome great tips and tricks, check it out!

Don McCaugheyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07415126617410591475noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3317681194976291894.post-24886082918225228082011-12-06T07:01:00.000-08:002011-12-06T07:01:00.424-08:00

Welcome to another Objective-C Tuesdays. Last week, we looked at sorting C arrays and NSArrays. Today, we will continue looking at sorting NSArrays using NSSortDescriptors.As we saw last week, the sorting methods of NSArray require you to specify a comparator in one form or another. When sorting an NSArray of simple objects like NSStrings or NSDates, the comparators are usually pretty simple to

Don McCaugheyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07415126617410591475noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3317681194976291894.post-88505389666495286412011-12-05T07:01:00.000-08:002011-12-05T07:01:01.310-08:00

Less than two months after the release of iOS 5, nearly half of all iOS device owners have upgraded. Marco Arment, the developer of Instapaper (one of my favorite and frequently used apps), periodically releases iOS metrics he gathers from Instapaper users detailing the breakdown of iOS versions and iOS device types.The tl;dr conclusion: nearly 99% of Instapaper users have iOS 4.0 or later, and

Don McCaugheyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07415126617410591475noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3317681194976291894.post-19020278342217764482011-11-30T07:01:00.000-08:002011-11-30T09:14:59.950-08:00

If you're looking for a great gift idea for that geek in you life (or for yourself :-) and you're interested in computer hardware as well as software, check out Making Embedded Systems: Design Patterns for Great Software by Elecia White. I had the good fortune to work with Elecia on a project last year and she's a top notch engineer -- and now an O'Reilly author. In her new book Making Embedded

Don McCaugheyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07415126617410591475noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3317681194976291894.post-54341454060630105082011-11-29T07:01:00.000-08:002011-12-12T19:44:34.100-08:00

Good news everyone! Objective-C Tuesdays is back! We left off a few weeks ago talking about techniques for inserting and removing items in arrays. Today we will cover sorting C arrays as well as NSArrays and NSMutableArrays.Sorting C arrays with qsort()The C standard library includes only one built-in way to sort C arrays: the qsort() function. qsort() is an implementation of the quicksort

Don McCaugheyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07415126617410591475noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3317681194976291894.post-35822374343793149392011-10-05T19:59:00.000-07:002011-10-05T20:10:51.689-07:00

I lived in Palo Alto for many years, and would see Steve Jobs around town from time to time. I'd see him buying flowers at Stanford Florist, shopping for organic lentils in Whole Foods, talking on his iPhone outside Evvia before meeting people for dinner or strolling with his wife past Fraiche on a sunny afternoon.And I've followed his career from the beginning, starting when I was a nerdy kid

Don McCaugheyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07415126617410591475noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3317681194976291894.post-39956285417631154852011-08-31T08:00:00.000-07:002011-08-31T08:10:25.904-07:00

And, one of the things I’ve always found is that you’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards for the technology. You can’t start with the technology and try to figure out where you’re going to try to sell it. And I made this mistake probably more than anybody else in this room. And I got the scar tissue to prove it. And I know that it’s the case. ... And as we have tried

Don McCaugheyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07415126617410591475noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3317681194976291894.post-47147613629912035682011-08-03T07:00:00.000-07:002011-08-03T07:00:21.692-07:00

If you're building mobile apps these days, you're probably watching the Android market closely if you're not already developing for it. With reports coming in weekly that Android activations are growing faster than ever, simple extrapolation will tell you that soon, there will be more Android devices on that planet than people. Many successful mobile devs, most of them currently focused on

Don McCaugheyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16673164543469346037noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3317681194976291894.post-23044646380086924012011-08-02T10:16:00.000-07:002011-11-29T08:16:50.901-08:00

Welcome back to Objective-C Tuesdays. Last time we were talking about dynamic arrays in C and NSMutableArray in Objective-C. We'll continue looking at both today.We looked at using malloc() or calloc() to dynamically allocate a block of memory that you can treat like an array. This is very useful when you don't know the number of items you need to store until run time or when you need the array

Don McCaugheyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16673164543469346037noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3317681194976291894.post-5398827876873389072011-07-26T07:40:00.000-07:002011-07-26T07:40:01.585-07:00

Another week, another Objective-C Tuesdays. Last week we began our series on data structures with a look at arrays in C and the NSArray class. Both C arrays and NSArray objects have serious limitations: C arrays are fixed in size and NSArrays are immutable. Today we will look at overcoming those limitations. Dynamically allocated memory C arrays are fixed in size when they are declared: int

Don McCaugheyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16673164543469346037noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3317681194976291894.post-59637132034396149332011-07-20T10:13:00.000-07:002011-07-20T10:13:23.277-07:00

I just came across this page about Lion Recovery. I had read about the recovery partition earlier this morning in the excellent Ars Technica Lion review by John Siracusa, but new Macs have a feature called "Internet Recovery" that lets you automatically download a Lion recovery disk image from Apple's servers, even if you've wiped your hard drive: If your Mac problem is a little less common —

Don McCaugheyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16673164543469346037noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3317681194976291894.post-82467651349885366682011-07-20T09:24:00.000-07:002011-10-06T09:22:05.096-07:00

If you're planning to install OS X Lion, but you want the safety and security of a physical install disk, or you prefer to wipe the hard drive and do a clean install, you can create your own bootable DVD installer using the Lion installer app from the Mac App Store and the Disk Utility application on your current Mac. Thomas Brand shows you how.

Don McCaugheyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16673164543469346037noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3317681194976291894.post-54804520048495698232011-07-20T07:07:00.000-07:002011-07-20T07:07:00.843-07:00

Some good advice on the comma operator and when to use it from Jerry Ryle at MindTribe: Comma operator?! Isn’t that thing just a separator? Nope. It’s occasionally an operator. Read more about the rarely used comma operator in C. And MindTribe is looking to hire some great embedded developers.

Don McCaugheyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16673164543469346037noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3317681194976291894.post-59914053182622654502011-07-19T07:01:00.000-07:002011-07-26T07:41:41.954-07:00

See Also Looping in Objective-C Variables in Objective-C Strings in Objective-C Welcome back to Objective-C Tuesdays. Last time we wrapped up our series on strings by looking at regular expressions in Objective-C. Today we begin a new series: data structures. The first data structure that we will examine is the array. Most languages have some concept of an array, though it is sometimes called a

Don McCaugheyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16673164543469346037noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3317681194976291894.post-76271046903180892882011-07-19T07:00:00.000-07:002011-07-25T11:56:32.856-07:00

See Also Looping in Objective-C Variables in Objective-C Last week we wrapped up our survey of strings by examining regular expressions in Objective-C. Here's a quick overview of the posts that cover strings: String basics: C strings string literals Unicode string literals wide character strings String operations: concatenating strings string comparison and equality slicing and dicing

Don McCaugheyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16673164543469346037noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3317681194976291894.post-21551354654846208482011-07-12T08:48:00.000-07:002011-07-25T11:59:17.844-07:00

See Also Strings in Objective-CWelcome back to Objective-C Tuesdays after a long hiatus. In the last couple of entries, we looked at searching and replacing in C strings and NSStrings. Today we'll look at a more powerful way to search and replace in strings: regular expressions. A mini language Regular expressions is a small, specialized programming language for matching text. In addition to

Don McCaugheyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16673164543469346037noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3317681194976291894.post-70380042102594714812011-06-15T08:06:00.000-07:002011-06-15T08:11:32.084-07:00

Fast Company ran an interesting article yesterday about Chinese mobile phone pirates and the Arab Spring, but one paragraph jumped out at me: With their tiny production runs, shanzhai could manufacture a thousand phones, seed the local markets, see if they caught on, and then crank out some more. Established players like Nokia were soon crying foul, even as they scrambled to keep up. Development

Don McCaugheyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16673164543469346037noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3317681194976291894.post-39681718954612943182011-06-03T09:30:00.001-07:002011-06-03T09:30:00.792-07:00

Hello and sorry for the delay.  Welcome to another installment of iPad Friday!  Today's iPad wallpapers introduce spring in our own special way.  Enjoy. (Click Image to view full-size then Save...)

Kevin Bomberryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07977425999974745365noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3317681194976291894.post-2536322930002878392011-06-03T09:30:00.000-07:002011-06-03T09:30:01.147-07:00

Hello and sorry for the delay.  Welcome to another installment of iPhone Friday!  Today's iPhone and iPod touch wallpapers introduce spring in our own special way.  Enjoy. (Click Image to view full-size then Save...)

Kevin Bomberryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07977425999974745365noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3317681194976291894.post-74334557551076384652011-05-11T07:00:00.000-07:002011-05-11T07:00:11.046-07:00

Mobile app development is hot right now. With smartphone sales approaching one million per day, it's likely that smartphones will outsell PCs this year. While PCs aren't going away anytime soon, it's a safe bet that mobile devices, including smartphones and tablets, will become the dominant application platform in the future. Mobile apps may still be a small slice of software sales in terms of

Don McCaugheyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16673164543469346037noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3317681194976291894.post-44374601265144083782011-02-14T07:43:00.000-08:002011-02-14T07:43:08.775-08:00

There was an interesting thread last week on Hacker News asking for opinions on writing cross-platform mobile apps.  Should you use a commercial framework like Appcelerator or Phone Gap, write core parts in C++ and custom UIs in Objective-C and Java, or just write everything twice?  Lots of opinions and some tips on when a cross-platform framework makes sense.

Don McCaugheyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16673164543469346037noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3317681194976291894.post-47253151764491693622011-01-27T09:32:00.000-08:002011-01-27T09:32:02.130-08:00

Mobile Orchard has a great interview with Chad Podoski, the founder of Shacked and creator of the Flickpad iPad app about his experiences marking his app in the App Store. Chad covers a lot of interesting ground: How often to release updates Dealing with 1 Star reviews Handling third party services like Facebook App review sites The impact of being featured by Apple and Daring Fireball

Don McCaugheyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16673164543469346037noreply@blogger.com0