2023
Creating hidden things
It’s always mildly interesting when you stumble across some odd behavior in a program and recognize it as something you’ve had to deal with as well in your projects.
This happened to me today in Autodesk Fusion 360.
One of the basic building blocks...
By Markus Chmelar, , development ux izurvive
2018
Reactive Cocoa - How to wait for multiple signals to complete
Recently, the Functional Reactive Programming (FPR) paradigm has been gaining momentum, but getting started can be hard as its necessary to change the way you’re thinking about the datafow in your program.
For some time now I’ve been answering questions...
By Markus Chmelar, , ios development rac fpr
2017
Get started with Bluetooth Printing on iOS with the Bixolon iOS SDK
We recently had to implement bluetooth printing to a mobile label printer to one of our applications. The specific printer was a Bixolon SPP-R200IIIik. Bixolon provides documentation and and SDK on their homepage.
Unfortunately, the documentation...
By Markus Chmelar, , ios development bluetooth printing
2016
Update to our iOS Localization Workflow
More than three years ago, I wrote about a localization workflow that works well in practice. It was based on the genstrings tool to scan the source code for usages of NSLocalizedString and update the .strings files accordingly. A custom script as...
By Markus Chmelar, , ios development
2015
About Unicode NSStrings
Last week, this post titled Why is Swift’s String API So Hard? by Mike Ash made the rounds. It explains in depth the kinds of problems that arise when working with strings in different encodings, especially in unicode, and how the Swift’s String API...
By Markus Chmelar, , development objective-c objc swift unicode nsstring
A nice perk of the new swift `defer` statement
The defer statement comes as part of the new error handling model in Swift 2.0. Its primary purpose is to help with cleanup of resources in the face of possible early exits due to errors being thrown.
But the use of defer is not limited to error...
By Markus Chmelar, , development xcode swift defer
2014
A Quest for better Testing of iOS Applications
When we started to work on our first big project together - Comicol - we were all about testing. We wrote a lot of unit test cases for every single method of every single class. About 30%-40% of the project’s overall code was code for unit tests.
By Markus Chmelar, , development xcode testing
2013
Xcode Conditional Compilation for Unit-Test Targets
When writing unit test cases, you need to distinguish between real use and test runs in your code from time to time. For example, you might want to send all requests to a test server, instead of the production server.
One possibility to do this is...
By Markus Chmelar, , development xcode testing
Building an Automated Testing & Error Reporting System for Android Apps
We recently had to finish a project under a lot of pressure, and decided that it would be nice if we could empower the ui/application exerciser monkey to automatically send us crash reports.
There are a few setbacks to using the adb monkey as is,...
By Lukas Nagl, , android development testing
Create a Sencha Touch WebApp and deploy within a native iOS App
In this post, I want to give a quick walk-through for building a small HTML5/CSS3/JavaScript application and then bundling it into a native iOS App.
If you don’t need to use native iOS features, you better have a look at how to generate a native package...
By Markus Chmelar, , html5 development xcode
A Localization Workflow that works well in Practice
Update
This blog post is outdated for swift. See this update for a worklow with swift. If you’re still using ObjC, the following workflow is still fine to use.
Original Article
For a long time, it wasn’t clear to me how to deal with the localization...
By Markus Chmelar, , ios development
2012
iZurvive released
Last week, we finally finished the development of our first App, iZurvive, and submitted it to the AppStore for review.
On last wednesday, it passed the review process and is now live on the AppStore! We can’t tell you how excited we currently are...
Fast Enumeration Part 2 - Partial Iteration of an Array
It’s been a while since I wrote the first part about Enumeration-Benchmarks. In this second part, I investigate the performance of various methods for achieving a task that seems to be quite common to me: enumerating ‘all but the last’ elements.
By Markus Chmelar, , ios development
Performance Benchmark of Methods for Enumerating a NSArray Pt.1
A few days ago, a colleague of ours had to compare the objects in an NSArray with each other in order to find two specific matching elements. When he asked us how to achieve this in a more efficient manner I started thinking.
The first thing that...
By Markus Chmelar, , ios development
Splitting PDF into Pages on iOS
For a recent project, we had to split a PDF document with any number of pages into single PDF files that contained exactly one page of the source file each. The splitting had to be done by the app itself, and the text in the resulting documents had...
By Markus Chmelar, , ios development
Successful Crunching
The crunch-phase of a project, in which a team works frantically in order to finish a product until a deadline, can be an excruciating time for all the people involved. During my time as software developer, I had my fair share of crunshing, but nevertheless...