hasseg.orgFaux Pas: Static Error Detection for Xcode Projects
Posted on July 23, 2014
Filed under iOS, Mac, Programming
I have been working on an app called Faux Pas for a long time now. It’s a static error detection tool for Xcode projects: you point this app to your project, and it’ll work through it, trying to find common errors or departures from best practices.
It’s been in a long private beta, and now it’s time to release it to a wider audience. Find more information from the introductory blog post over at the app’s website.
The Compiler is Your Friend
Posted on May 30, 2013
Filed under Featured, iOS, Mac, Programming, Talks
Which compiler warnings should I enable for my iOS/Mac app project? How do I enable warnings that Xcode doesn’t have a checkbox for? How do I disable warnings (either completely, for specific files, or in specific sections of code?) Where do I go to find out what warnings are available? How do I enable warnings for my own code, but disable them for third-party code that I compile into my bundle? What about warnings that are triggered in third-party headers?
I did a talk on compiler warnings at the HelsinkiOS/CocoaHeads April 2013 meetup that answers all of the above questions. The slides are available at Speaker Deck, and embedded in this post below.
Handling NSStrings Like a Boss
Posted on May 28, 2013
Filed under Featured, iOS, Mac, Programming, Talks
Strings are arguably the most common data structures used by practicing programmers. They’re easy to conceptualize as “sequences of characters,” but it’s important to note the leakiness of this abstraction, and to know how (and when) to consider the details of how what we think of as “characters” are represented in modern software.
I did a talk on this topic at the HelsinkiOS/CocoaHeads February 2013 meetup — obviously from the point of view of Apple’s platform APIs. The slides are available at Speaker Deck, and embedded in this post below.
iOS & OS X Localization Practicum
Posted on May 28, 2013
Filed under Featured, iOS, Mac, Programming, Talks
I did a talk on the localization of iOS and OS X projects at the HelsinkiOS February 2012 meetup. The slides are available at Speaker Deck, and embedded in this post below.
Use Unicode Emoji as Icons in Native iOS Apps
Posted on April 29, 2012
Filed under Featured, iOS, Programming
A while back, I wrote about using unicode emoji characters as icons in web apps. The big caveat with that was that these characters were only available on iOS devices, which made the trick much less useful in a web app, which of course are generally meant to be more or less cross-platform. If you’re developing a native iOS app, though, using these standard colorful bitmap emoji characters as icons is a much more realistic proposition, because you can be sure that all the devices your app runs on will have them available. In this post I will show how to easily do this.
jEdit Syntax Highlighting Mode for the Peg/Leg Parser Generator ‘Leg’ Syntax
Posted on April 4, 2011
Filed under jEdit, Programming
I’ve been working on a fast and embeddable Markdown parser that can be used for syntax highlighting in editors, based on the PEG grammar from John MacFarlane’s peg-markdown compiler project. The grammar is written in leg, a syntax for the peg/leg parser generator by Ian Piumarta, and to make my work with this new syntax a bit more pleasant I implemented a jEdit mode for it.
jEdit Macro for Opening the File Browser at Current Buffer’s “Project Root” Directory
Posted on October 13, 2010
Filed under jEdit, Programming, Scripts
When I’m working with code in jEdit, my editor of choice, I like to keep the file browser open and docked to the left side of my editor window. When I’m switching between files — often belonging to different projects — I find myself reaching for the mouse in order to manually navigate the file browser to the root folder of the project the currently open file belongs to. I started doing this so often that I decided to whip up a small macro to do it for me.
Getting Events/Tasks From the OS X Calendar Store in a Custom Format like XML, CSV or LaTeX
Posted on October 13, 2010
Filed under Mac, Programming, Scripts
Over the past couple of years I’ve gotten a few emails from users of icalBuddy who would like to somehow automate the task of generating CSV, XML/HTML or LaTeX output from the items in their calendar. Unfortunately icalBuddy isn’t set up to provide any kind of arbitrary output format (and I didn’t want to re-architect it to do that) but a while ago I finally had the time and motivation to figure out a small solution for this: a Python helper class for writing scripts that produce whatever type of output your heart desires.
Use Unicode Emoji as Image-Free Icons in iOS Web Apps
Posted on July 20, 2010
Filed under iOS, Programming, Scripts
In version 2.2 of iOS — Apple’s “mobile” operating system used in the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad — support for Emoji was added. These small 12×12 pixel icons are meant to be used in text messaging in Japan but because they’re implemented simply as unicode symbols in the device they can be used as icons when we know they’re available.
How to Display Events or Tasks on Your Desktop With icalBuddy
Posted on July 13, 2010
Filed under Featured, Mac, Miscallaneous
I don’t really have any statistics about this but I’m quite sure that an overwhelming majority of the users of my icalBuddy program are using it to display calendar data on their desktop via GeekTool. Several tutorials on how to get this done have been written by different people, mainly for relatively non-technical users, which I think is great. The problem seems to be that many people don’t know how to configure icalBuddy to give them the kind of output they’d like and end up copy-pasting the commands from these blogs (some of these blog posts also contain outdated information about a bunch of things). Hopefully this short tutorial (and the usage examples page) will offer an easy way to make a more informed decision about how to get this done.
Earlier Posts »