I was lucky enough to be able to speak at CocoaConf Chicago 2014 about some more advanced Core Data topics. The bulk of the talk surrounded concurrency and data model migrations but I did touch on a number of other things. Sadly the session wasn't recorded, but I am considering recording a screencast if there is enough interest. [slideshare id=32054049&doc=advancedcoredata-140307170729-phpapp01]
Some people have asked me what it's like working for Automattic. Every employee of Automattic has a different perspective on what it means to work here. Here are a few things I feel are important to me. Work Wherever, WheneverAutomattic is a completely distributed company. We have a headquarters in San Francisco, CA USA but only a small percentage of us work out that office. Most of us work from home, some of us work on the road, others work from a coworking space. Sometimes it's nice being able to change your location once in a while - I pretty much like working from my home office. I like working a regular day, usually 7am - 4pm my local time and I fit some sort of exercise routine in there half way through. We have flexibility to make our own hours and take the time off we need to. We're adults and we're treated as such. ...
Do you have a ScanSnap scanner on your Mac and scan things to Evernote? You notice that if you have Evernote running, ScanSnap can't launch Evernote properly? You might get an error message like the following: Failed to start up Evernote for Mac.Make sure that the selected application is installed correctly.Turns out Evernote is broken. EvernoteHelper.app is an embedded application that runs while Evernote is running (or while it's in the background) and if you're set to English, its name is the same as the main Evernote application. Technically, the CFBundleName is being overridden in the InfoPlist.strings file. You can verify this by running /Applications/Utilities/Activity Monitor.app and seeing: ...
I cut the cord two years ago from cable TV but am interested in using apps for the iPad and Roku to watch live cable TV. I called Time Warner Cable today to ask them if they offered a cable TV package that wouldn't require a physical installation. TL;DR - using the TWC TV apps (iPad, Android tablet, Roku) requires a physical install. My SituationMost of the summer (April - October) I'm not home on the weekends as we have a seasonal spot at a campground about 3 hours away from home. We ended up cutting cable two years ago and don't really miss it for what we used of it. At one time I ran a MythTV server with two tuner cards, and it worked well. I have since moved to two dual-tuner HDHomeRun units with Elgato's EyeTV running on a Mac mini. It works well enough and it allows me to stream and download any recorded content to my iPad/iPhone. I can even watch live remotely and not pay anything extra. ...
Back in iOS 4, a nifty block-based observer method was added to NSNotificationCenter: (id)addObserverForName:(NSString *)name object:(id)obj queue:(NSOperationQueue *)queue usingBlock:(void (^)(NSNotification *))block; Super convenient, right? I love using blocks to pass simple callbacks to controllers instead of creating a delegate protocol. There is a catch with this method, and it's not terribly obvious unless you're looking closely. The method returns (id) - according to Apple's documentation the return object is "An opaque object to act as the observer". What does this mean? ...
All of my teen and adult life I realized that I perceive the world a little differently than most. I’d like to think I’m a smart guy but I never did very well in high school on exams especially for topics that weren’t science/math/computer related. I couldn’t read textbooks very well; my eyes would gloss over the details and I’d realize after reading a page I retained none of it. I hated research papers the most. In my early teens I discovered electronic music (at the time everything was called techno) and I realized listening to it while doing homework would keep that part of my brain busy so I could somewhat focus. I never put a name to the condition and just moved forward. ...
I had the awesome privilege of being a guest panelist on the iPhreaks podcast talking about scalable cloud apps to back your mobile phone apps. We talked mostly about Parse but we did also discuss a lot of new service offerings like Microsoft Azure, Simperium, and a few others. It was fun and unscripted for sure. http://iphreaksshow.com/021-iphreaks-show-scalable-cloud-applications-with-aaron-douglas/ Take a listen and make sure to subscribe to their podcast if you're even remotely interested in Mac and iOS development!
At first glance this news seems awesome for consumers: Apple offering 'last compatible version' of iOS apps for older hardwareFinally my old iPhone 3G can download apps that I purchased after iOS 4 became obsolete! This should have been communicated to us as developers and the revenue channel for Apple. Developers, on the other hand, should be ready for an onslaught of support requests they can do absolutely nothing about. We've assumed, since the beginning of Apple App Store time, that old versions were not installable by devices unless they pulled a backup IPA and installed it manually. We know this happens fairly rarely. Some of us put checks in the app to notify users of new versions in the App Store, but did we prevent the app from functioning? Probably not. ...
I've never been able to put in words the reason why I am attached to using written notes over my iPad until today. I was sitting in a talk today by Rob Martin when I had an epiphany. When I'm holding my opened notebook, the crisp clean chunky feel of unused pages on the right feels like raw potential. The pages on the left, roughened from notes written on them, feels like accomplishment. ...
I gave a talk today at That Conference in Wisconsin Dells, WI USA. I'm posting my slides here so that others who didn't have the chance to go can peruse them. Hit me up with any questions or if you'd like to have audio to go with it. I'd have to record it, but would love to do so if there is a desire. Cheers! GitHub: https://github.com/astralbodies/CoreDataRabbitHole [slideshare id=25224548&style=max-width: 427px; border: 1px solid #CCC; border-width: 1px 1px 0; margin-bottom: 5px;&sc=no] ...