My friend, and fellow Pittsburgh CocoaHead, Adam Ratana has posted about some lessons learned when localizing his Sun Surveyor app for iOS and Android.

• Notifications – registering and posting, Handling and spying
• Anatomy of a Bug Report
• String and String, what is String?
• A quieter Log
• Where does it go, George? (three places you can put instance variables)
• The Ranch at CocoaConf DC, 2012
• So, what next? (what to do after reading a book or taking a course)
• Beware the Cruftmonster
• NS-structs
• Editorial Rule-making
• Property List Serialization
• Actually finding a memory management error with Instruments
• BOOL’s sharp corners
• Both kinds of Cocoa
• Table Scanning
• A motivation for ivar decorations
• Why Protocols?, Protocols and Delegation (including a cheesy little world map view), and Adopting protocols in class extensions
• isEqual[ToString]: and going down a rabbit-hole
• NSError NoNo
• Objective-C Literals, and more of the same
• An easy to use block-based timing utility
• Some category pros and cons (hrm, the cat looks familiar)
• and finally an ARC Gotcha.

Well, OK, that’s everything, even the not-so-gemmy. For the forseeable future my geek writing will be over there, and I’ll reserve this weblog for cute Vikki pictures:

]]> http://borkwarellc.wordpress.com/2012/04/13/stuff-going-on-at-the-ranch/feed/ 0 MarkD IMG_0005.JPG IMG_0057.JPG IMG_0090.JPG IMG_0175.JPG IMG_0191.JPG IMG_0219.JPG http://borkwarellc.wordpress.com/2012/03/02/keith-on-monochrome-icons/ http://borkwarellc.wordpress.com/2012/03/02/keith-on-monochrome-icons/#comments Fri, 02 Mar 2012 15:22:31 +0000 Mark Dalrymple https://borkwarellc.wordpress.com/?p=269 ]]> Keith Blount, the brain behind Scrivener (one of my favorite pieces of software), talks about The Mac Monochrome Trend – A Plea For Keeping Things Colourful:

When Apple decided to drain the icons in these programs of their colour, I learned something about the way my brain works that I hadn’t hitherto ever had to think about: my brain is an awful lot faster at processing colours than it is at processing shapes.

I’m the same way. I use a mix of 10.6 and 10.7 machines. When I go back to 10.6, I’m reminded how quickly I recognize the sidebar icons in the Finder, and on 10.7, it’s all a gray mass.

One of the members, Patrick Cassell, runs an Apple news and commentary blog at iTechCrossroads.  He did a brief interview, and posted it online.

I wasn’t quite expecting a verbatim interview, so like I guess like that’s how I actually speak and stuff.  But there were some interesting questions.

Here’s part 1, and part 2.

TL;DR: I can batch show and hide UIViews really easily now. Easier than setting up a bunch of outlets, fiddling with tags, making dummy views, or groveling through the view hierarchy.

I bet it’s Cocoa 101 nowadays, but they were new to me, pretty much seeing the reference when dragging a connection to header files (which I never do) and promptly forgetting about them. I might have seen reference to them in a WWDC sessions or something. But finally now I had a real use. Yay! For a lot of this stuff I need to actually use it for Something Real before it sticks in my brain. I can learn stuff by doing, but I’m lousy at memorization. Just look at my history grades during high school. On second thought, please don’t.

RideBuddy™ is one of the new apps coming from Cycling Fusion. Amongst a ton of other stuff, RideBuddy lets you track workout time in various heart zones – ranges of heart rates that have different benefits and consequences to the body. We like the Sally Edwards Heart Zones® system, which is a five-zone system based on certain physiological markers. I won’t get into specifics here, you can join the Cycling Fusion Winter Training in January and get the full details.

Five zones are kind of a lot for a beginner or just a casual rider to wrap their mind around, so Sally created Zoning™, a friendlier three-zone system and a color-coded heart rate monitor. It’s only three zones, but it’s based on the same physiological markers as the five-zone system. You can get a lot of health and training benefit by using the three zone system, and can graduate to the five-zone system when you feel up to it.

My stuff needs to support both. So, I have a number of screens like this one:

Something that’ll support three zones or five zones. Internally I can support from one to five zones. The code that adjusts the layouts based on the zone system in-use hides everything zone-related, then populates and enables stuff zone-by-zone until it runs out of zones. In the above screenie I have four objects per zone: two static labels and two text fields. zone zone zone.

To simplify that work, I have five IBOutletCollection(UIView)s — one for each zone. I walk through all of them to Hide All The Things, then walk the zones enabling a particular collection and populating items until I run out of zones. If I don’t hit a collection, it stays hidden.

Understandably, this is so much nicer than setting up an IBOutlet for each label and text field and making the connections. Or setting a tag on the items. Or groveling through the view hierarchy showing and hiding things. Or having a dummy UIView just to be a container. Just add the outlet collection and make connections in IB.

Markus Möller on Twitter “uses them for animating / moving groups of views. Better than putting them all in a container view. Less hierarchy.” which is another excellent use.

I had a great time when I spoke at CocoaConf this last August in Columbus, OH. It was in my back yard and was a no-brainer to go to. I had a huge amount of fun, learned a lot from the other speakers, and had a fun panel discussion. Plus Dave Klein’s family is a lot of fun. Be sure to hang out with Solomon if he’s there.

I’m not sure what my gesture over there is from. Maybe from the virtual sock puppet portion of “Performance Tuning.”

CocoaConf will be in Raleigh NC, December 2th and 3th. You can browse the full schedule to see if stuff is interesting to you. There’s a registration page if you want to go. I can’t make it because I’ll be playing a concert that weekend, otherwise I’d probably head down.  (December is always nuts for me.)

There’s a $50 discount for CocoaHeads folk. The coupon code is a secret to the non-COCOAHEAD individuals out there, but smart folks should be able to figure it out.

I’ve been to a bunch of SteveNotes.  The RDF was real.  I always recommended WWDC (and MacWorld) newtimers  to do at least one SteveNote.  Now we can just reminisce.

The thing that’s really impressed me about Post-NeXT Apple is the quality of people attracted to, and kept by, the company.  I have friends inside of the The Fruit, all of whom are amazingly awesome.  Curtis. Zach. Evan. Ben. Bill. Clark. Chris. Dave. John.  And any others I’ve forgotten.  It’s a true testament to the leadership that such talent has been assembled.

I never met the man.  I did pass within 30 feet of him on the Google campus a couple of years before.  I was helping move 200 pounds of homebrew for a tech talk, and saw someone sitting under a tree chatting with someone else.  I asked my companion “is that…”  ”yes it is”  ”whoa”.  And we went on our merry way.

I’m gonna head over to folklore.org and read some stories now.

My first App got accepted into the AppStore yesterday – Cycling Fusion’s Class Builder™. Woot! Amazingly enough, it went through the approval process without a peep. There’s screen shots and tutorial videos (some still in the making – didn’t expect AppStore approval so quickly) at the link. And it’s at the AppStore.

Class Builder is a tool for Indoor Cycling (a.k.a. “Spinning®”) instructors to lead better classes. Rather than juggling an ipod, sheets of paper or 3×5 cards, and a stopwatch; instructors can plug their Device into the club sound system, run the class, and have cues pop up at the proper time during the class. They can also configure pre-class and post-class music for ambience before and afterwards. If the club has a projector, the instructor can plug their Device into the projector and show everyone the ride profile, along with additional information like current cadence / power / HeartZone®. A slideshow of photos can be shown during the pre-class time to help set the mood.

Despite “Class” in the name, this has nothing to do with programming.

Folks have asked me what I’ve been up to in the year-and-change since I left Google to work with Cycling Fusion. This is it, and the usual billion other things that go on when you work at a startup (along with the major update to AMOSXP)

The code is pretty much all mine, end-to-end. 13,000 non-comment / non-whitespace / non-brace LoC, 84 classes, 32 html files, and 677 .pngs. Not huge, but respectable. It was my first time really to work on something small enough that could be coded by a single programmer – usually I work on behind-the-scenes stuff that nobody else wants to touch. App design was by me and Gene Nacey, the fearless leader of Cycling Fusion. Graphic design by Emanuel Rufino and me. Luckily I now have the Photoshop skills to convert between an inspired artist and the user interface, to tone things down or amp them up as needed to fit the demands of the UI.

Class Builder is a part of the overall Cycling Fusion strategy for bringing the worlds of Indoor and Outdoor cycling together. We’re revolutionizing Indoor Cycling as we now know it through curriculum and certification, targeted training programs, web-based tools, mobile device apps, licensable music and an online video training library. Our big coming-out party is in the fall. If you’re into that kind of stuff, come on down to the ICI Pro Conference in October and check us out.

This book is a massive overhaul of the second edition.  I dropped a number of chapters (I’m pretty sure folks know about version control systems these days), and a number were added (DTrace and GCD anyone?), with pretty much everything edited and improved (bye-bye Shark :-(  Hello Instruments :-) ), covering stuff through 10.6 / iOS 4.  Students taking my class at the ranch get to be guinea pigs a sneak peek of the Lion-related material.  It had already been over five years since the second edition, so we decided to go ahead and ship it, and then do a thorough job on the Lion / iOS5 / iCloud stuff in a later edition.  Hopefully not so much later this time.

Speaking of Editing, Susan and Chris Loper from Intelligent English edited the book and maintained the DocBook-based pipeline of tools.  The second edition did not have an editor, and it shows.  Chris wrangled the tools, and thanks to Susan’s work I’m quite proud of the third edition, the quality of the writing, and the quality of the index (another second edition sore spot).

These things make great Labor Day gifts.  Be sure to order several for the children.  I’ll have a couple with me at CocoaHeads/Pittsburgh this week to give away.

Edit2: Gaige Paulsen pointed out that it’s already available in the iBooks / Kindle stores.  You can snarf the free sample and check out the table of contents.

Edit1: Folks have asked what’s new (skimming down the ToC – I’ve been living inside this thing, and teaching out of it for five years now…)

• ObjC 2.0 stuff, properties, etc
• Blocks
• 64-Bit computing
• getopt_long
• lib/otool
• Garbage Collection
• Debugging techniques
• DTrace
• Overhaul of Performance Tuning
• Instruments
• NSFileManager got a complete overhaul
• IPv6, overhaul of the code
• CFHost
• FSEvents
• Operations
• GCD