Aaron Douglas

disqus

Migrated back to WordPress

I've been using Octopress for over year and I really enjoyed it.  You have to love the command line, understand Git, and know your stuff when something breaks.  Oh, and it will break.  A lot.  But when you fix it, you get that satisfaction that you're

Diversity in Developers

I had an excellent weekend at CocoaConf Chicago meeting interesting people and reconnecting with many as well. One of the subjects that was brought up in Brittany Tarvin's Friday Keynote talk was that of women in the technology field. I had the pleasure of meeting Brittany at SecondConf

Scrolling to hidden table view cells

I'm currently using BSKeyboardControls to add that fancy Next/Previous/Done buttons to the top of the keyboard on the iPad. I have noticed, however, that while scrolling through the fields in a UITableView, the cursor would sometimes disappear and the keyboard would be detached (typing does nothing)

Adding the fancy search magnifying glass to your UITableView

So you're working on a search screen or popover with UITableViewController and you're wondering how to get that fancy search magnifying glass in your search results, right? In my example, I have my table view sourced by a simple array of data. This may not be

Bringing in your own hardware to work

As a consultant, I have to move around to various companies as part of my job. Sometimes I am able to stay with the same client for months, sometimes weeks. The one thing that continues to be an issue wherever I go is the availability of a suitable development environment

Spring 3.1's PropertyPlaceholderConfigurer

Spring 3.1 brought a lot of good changes to the framework but with any version change, behaviors can be different. Spring does a good job documenting most of this API changes but there is one that I apparently missed or underestimated the impact of. Property files can be "

Maven & Eclipse target folder + validation stabbyness

Does using Maven with Eclipse make you stabby when you spend an hour waiting for Eclipse to finish validating files? You may not realize it, but Eclipse is indexing/validating files inside of your project's target folders! Yes kids, this is annoying and time consuming. The target folders

Resizing a UITextView automatically with the keyboard

One of the biggest UI no-nos you can perform in iOS is creating a UITextView that assumes the size of the keyboard on the screen before the keyboard even shows up. You should be dynamically resizing your text views by looking at the dimensions of the keyboard, and not assuming

instruments

Fixing Layer Transparency Issues in Xcode

If you're looking to get higher frame rates and general application performance tweaks from your iOS application, you may need to take a look at transparent settings on your subviews. Any time you set a subview to be transparent, the OS has to blend multiple layers together to

Google Data API

I've started to mess around with the Google Data APIs recently to help support my Migraine Diary iOS application. Specifically I want users to be able to export their journal entries into a Google Spreadsheet rather than just a plain CSV file. I am using the Objective-C client

Adium always presenting Apple Quarantine Message

I've been getting a warning dialog on my Mac (Lion 10.7) when opening Adium. It recently updated to the newest beta and is presenting the following quarantine message every time I open it - “Adium.app” is an application downloaded from the Internet. Are you sure you

Missing AccessibilitySettingsLoader bundle with iOS 5.0.1 debugging

After upgrading my iPhone 4 to iOS 5.0.1, Xcode has been giving me the following error message when debugging my Migraine Diary app remotely: warning: Unable to read symbols for /Users/aaron/Library/Developer/Xcode/iOS DeviceSupport/5.0.1 (9A405)/Symbols/System/Library/AccessibilityBundles/AccessibilitySettingsLoader.bundle/AccessibilitySettingsLoader

ios

iOS Basics: nil vs NULL vs NSNull

Yes, there are three ways to represent a null value in Objective-C. NULL = Absence of a value with C-style pointers nil = Absence of value with Objective-C object variables NSNull = A nil boxed as an object for storage in a collection If you try adding nil to a NSDictionary or NSArray,

apple

iOS - Customize Table View Cells

Ever wanted to have alternated colors on your table view cells? If so, you've probably done something inside of cellForRowAtIndexPath and applied a background color to your cell there. Would you be surprised to know that's completely wrong?  Yup.  Wrong.  WRONG WRONG WRONG. I didn'

ios

iOS - Pull App Version From Bundle Configuration

We all like to put the current application version number in an "about" screen somewhere for users to reference.  It's a pain, however, to have to update that screen every time we do a release as well as the version in the target configuration for the

Time Warner Cable Power / SNR Acceptable Values

I recently upgraded my Time Warner Cable RoadRunner service to the RoadRunner Extreme 30Mbps down / 5Mbps up service. Part of that service upgrade required a new modem to be installed and a technician to come out to validate line quality values. Turns out, I could have done a self install

apple

iTunes Connect - Invalid Binary

I spent the past week pulling out my hair trying to submit an update for Centare's EyeOnWeather application to iTunes Connect.  I kept getting a reject from the system and all I got for an error message was "Invalid Binary."  THANKS, THAT'S SOOPER. Eventually

hig

UITextView having rounded corners

I've been using a UITextView in an app and realized that it didn't have any rounded edges like the default behavior exhibited by the built-in iOS apps.  For example in the calendar app, setting the Notes field shows: Inside of Apple's Human Interface guidelines

apple

Xcode 4 - Problem submitting App with Static Library

I'm submitting a new version of my Migraine Diary App to the App Store and was running into problems with Xcode 4 giving me the following error: "[Your App Name] does not contain a single-bundle application or contains multiple products. Please select another archive, or adjust your

apple

iOS Basics - UINavigation Controller & Back Button Text

I've brought an old project out of the moth balls recently, the Migraine Diary application I wrote as part of my master's thesis.  It was my first "real" iPhone app and I call tell I didn't know what I was doing entirely

emoji

iPhone Emoji in Adium

Have you enabled Emoji on your iPhone to use emoticon-like characters like 13 year-old Japanese girls?  Well if you have, you've noticed that sending those characters in e-mail and IM to non-iPhone users ends up in little boxes of unreadable gibberish if you're lucky or whitespace.

apple

Mac OS X - Adding a loopback alias

I do a lot of local web development on my MacBook Pro.  Frequently I had multiple tiers of servers running - a Jetty instance running the web tier and a JBoss/EJB server doing the business tier behind it.  The problem is JBoss opens up so many ports on a

Evernote

How Evernote Won My Time Warner Battle

If you don't know what Evernote is, I'll quickly summarize it for you.  Evernote is a cloud-based service that is accessible through the means of a web site, mobile and computer application and various other APIs.  The point of Evernote is that if you ever find

apple

CDMA / Verizon iPhone

There has been quite a bit of press about the upcoming Verizon / CDMA iPhone.  I'm happy to hear that AT&T will finally lose the monopoly on the iPhone in the United States, but I'm disappointed that nothing has come out yet about T-Mobile carrying

hibernate

Hibernate 3.6.0.Final + PostgreSQL + CLOBs

I recently upgraded a project I'm working on to Hibernate 3.6.0.Final from 3.5.6 and realized that one of my entities that had a CLOB (character large object) was pooping out.  I was getting an exception stack track similar to: Caused by: org.postgresql.