Krzysztof Zabłocki

How do you setup your Cocoa projects? Do you always set same warnings, clone configurations and do bunch of other stuff? Or maybe you work in a big company and you are missing some standardised setup?

Programmers tend to automatise boring and repetitive tasks, yet I often see people spending time and time again configuring their Xcode Projects, even thought they always set it up same way.

This tutorial is part of a new series, my goal is to teach you new things but don’t treat you like a complete newbie. First tutorial in the series will be the most detailed one, but don’t expect your typical step by step guide from this series. Each next tutorial will assume more and more knowdlege from your part, get ready.

By the end of this tutorial you will have a simple game with level editor. And you won’t even need to write 250 lines of code to create it.

You probably saw StatusBoard by Panic. I’ve immediately thought it needs simple Jenkins widget.

If you still don’t have your Jenkins CI, you should spend some time and set it up before reading further.

I’ve just returned from NSConference #5 (which was awesome), there were many good talks there, but my favourite one was the one about Flipboard development tools/setup by Evan Doll.

One of the things that Evan showed was adding version and commit on top of your icon. Read more to learn how I’ve implemented it.

Do you use Interface Builder ? Even if you don’t like IB, read this short tip and referenced articles. If you have used IB before, you probably needed to reference one Xib view from another Xib / Storyboard. You probably wrote some code to create that view from code ? You don’t need to do that.

Boeing made a nice app for iPad

I was shown this app and asked if it’s hard to do this pinch to reveal animation. It’s actually quite easy to do with CoreAnimation.

We evolve and change our habits, probably many times every few years. Your code style changes, your approach to writing code in general.
That’s usually good but sometimes bad habits are introduced into that process and remain with you for long time. I would like to share my short thought of a few ‘not really that good’ habits that I’ve seen in myself and other people over the years. Some may be not look like bad ones…

You’ve probably seen Paper by http://www.fiftythree.com/, the app is pretty cool and the drawings look really nice and smooth. I’m working on my personal app that needs something similar, and after doing some research I’ve seen that there isn’t really anything like that available, some people try to use catmull roms etc. but that doesn’t look good enough. I will show you how you can achieve pretty cool drawing app.

Observer pattern is common on iOS platform, you use observers in NSNotificationCenter and in Key Value Observing. You need to remember to unregister before you release your observer object, if you don’t you are going to have crashes.For example notification get posted and system tries to inform deallocated object about it, and it crashes.

I’ve created a simple category that takes care of this problem, whenever an object that is observing (NSNotification or KVO) it’s going to be deallocated, it will be unregistered in those systems. The category that I’ve created doesn’t require you to call special methods or do anything fancy. Just include it and you have auto-removal working. It works on both ARC and non ARC code without any settings…

You can grab it from GitHub or read more to learn about few tricks I’ve used to make it happen.

So you want to know when user is interacting with your app and you don’t really care which screen is he using or what is he doing. You only want to know when he touches your app, for example: you make a game and you would like to automatically go into pause mode if user didn’t use your app for N minutes…

The solution that I will describe also can be used to find if or where UIWebView was touched without interfering with the web clickable content, for example showing an overlay where the user touched your UIWebView content…