I just stumbiled upon a great article about levereging ARC in your objective C applications. I’m doing ARC in a Cocoa Touch (iPad) app right now and it’s helped make a couple extra things clear.
Apple Push Notifications
I’ve been doing research about APNs lately which led me to investigate some PHP APNSs (Apple Push Notification Server). I found a promising PHP APNS with Easy APNS. Side note- They undoubtedly have SEO down pat for APNSs because they come up first every time.
Google Trends
Google trends is a great site to check out if your curious about trending topics. Whether you are curious about technology, fashion, stocks, celebrities, etc. It’s all there. In fact, it’s probably more fun if you just go not knowing what it’s about and just getting to learn the system – that’s what I did.
NSDictionary Neatness
I found out about the valueForKeyPath for NSArray today and apparently you can do a similar thing with NSDictionary. Find out more about Key-Value Collection Operators from Apple’s website.
Coder Forums
I want to give a shout out to some great Q&A forums I’ve used over the years. I’m giving these in chronological order:
kirupa.com — This a forum I used for help with actionscript. I used it for AS2 as well as AS3. It’s a home to Senocular who is one of the best developers I’ve ever recieved answers from.
Number Only Values
One of the guys I work with stumbled upon a quick and easy way to use logic to check if a value is not a valid number (non dependant on type). The logic is as follows:
"123" == +"123" // true
"asdf" == +"asdf" // false
Now you can check to see if your variables are numbers even when they come through as strings (eg. from a form)
Javascript’s Unruly Fractions
I just stumbled across a new factoid regarding javascript. Occasionally JS will throw unneeded decimal places on to float multiplication. For example:
0.1 * 0.2 // will show 0.020000000000000004
This can be remedied by a couple libraries such as BigDecimal and BigNumber. If you aren’t too concerned with exact fractions then it’s probably easier to use a Math.round
String Format Specifiers
I’ve been doing a lot of IOS on the weekends lately and today I ran into two problems in regard to String Format Specifiers. I found out that if I don’t use them correctly then xcode gives me runtime errors that look like they are related to bad memory management, but it’s just because I used the wrong specifier. Continue reading
Facebook Oauth in Flash
Recently I stumbled upon a talented AS3 developer. I was reading an article on “like” buttons from within flash and when I was sent to a page of his that covered Facebook Oauth connections in Flash. He has some fun projects on there and the header of his page is p2p drawing in flash. Pretty cool.
Code Sharing Tools
I added some code sharing tools recently and wanted to give you the scoop. I use two: One is Github’s tools for sharing code and it’s called Gist. The other is a pretty widely used markdown display tool that has a bunch of nice features (like coloring text and showing line numbers) which is Alex Gorbatchev’s Syntax Highlighter. Hopefully one or both works for you too!