Stack Overflow is an amazing resource for computer programmers. I've asked a lot of questions there, and answered a lot of questions there, and I've found the answers to lots and lots of questions that someone else has already asked. Participating in Stack Overflow has been great.
However, there have …
It's OK to have heroes, right?
I didn't think I had any heroes, but when Steve Jobs passed away last week, it hit me harder than expected. I didn't cry, I didn't go into a funk, but I was sad and felt like I'd lost something.
We idealize our heroes …
I've been a happy iPhone and iPad user for a while, but I'm currently involved in developing Android applications, so I decided to buy an Android phone to use for a few weeks. It's important to understand the user-interface conventions and user expectations for whatever platform you are developing for …
I have a new open-source library on Github for use by iOS developers: KJMenuTableViewController.
KJMenuTableViewController is an Xcode project that contains set of classes that simplifies the
creation of "menus" in iOS applications using UITableViewController.
The UITableViewController class is a generic mechanism for presenting a scrollable list of
rows of …
Apple's iOS SDK provides a class, UIWebView, that provides a simple way to display HTML content in an iOS application. Many apps use UIWebView to display web pages, online help, and other formatted content.
For the basic purpose of displaying HTML content, it works pretty well. However, as it appears …
A couple of times per year, I have to work on something that requires me to write some JavaScript. When I do, I have to reacquaint myself with the language by skimming through JavaScript: The Good Parts and finding some good online reference documentation.
In an effort to reduce the …
My wife has had a minor planet named after her. This is the official naming citation, written by the planet's discoverer, Jim Bedient:
(268242) Pebble = 2005 JW1 Discovered 2005 May 4 by J. Bedient at Haleakala-Faulkes Telescope North. Pebble Johnson (b. 19xx) is an innovative teacher of middle-school science and …
When reading descriptions of how software is produced, I often wonder what role programmers play. Programmers used to be the people who made software, but now a lot of other people are involved and claim credit for doing the work.
There has to be an "architect" who guides the overall …
Matt Gallagher's "User interface strings in Cocoa" post is good for its overall purpose (telling people how to use NSLocalizedString()), but I especially like this little embedded rant:
A quick swipe at almost everybody: UTF-8 has been around since 1993 and Unicode 2.0 since 1996; if you have created …
The Apple Store is a great place to go if you want to play with new Apple products or get help at the Genius Bar. But if you go there to buy something, the experience is confusing and humiliating.
Everyone knows how the process of buying something at a store …