Apple

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't know this, but any styles applied to cells based on state or whatever should really be in willDisplayCell - NOT when you configure the cell itself! Per Apple's documentation for the Table View delegate - ...

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 I ended up attempting to contact iTunes Connect Support for further details. I thought it might have been missing icons, malformed Info.plist, something. I haven't changed anything in the project drastically with how it builds, so I was at a loss. Turns out, I was picking the wrong provisioning profile in my setup. Man I felt stupid. Ends up that I'm not crazy - Apple's documentation on how to set up your project for building still only references Xcode 3. Awesome for the rest of the world using Xcode 4. Here are some tips I got from Apple iTunes Connect support for pulling in information to submit to their developer team: ...

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 scheme to create a single-bundle application." There is an issue or maybe it's an intentional design thing with Xcode 4 and how it handles statically built libraries being included in your project. I'm specifically using Core Plot and it's instruction set hasn't been updated for Xcode 4 yet. Here are the things I had to do to get Core Plot to bundle correctly with my App to submit it: ...

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 looking through the code. What this has forced me to do, however, is re-learn some of the basics of iOS development and of Apple design patterns. I have been spending some time back in the Apple developer documentation and will probably be posting some of the gotchas that tripped me up two years ago and I'm solving now with the better, more elegant solution. ...

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 particular network adapter and trying to get JBoss and Jetty to share a single IP is a nightmare. So the easier way is to just create a new IP or alias your localhost (127.0.0.1) into something like 127.0.0.2. When you start up Jetty, you pass in the binding IP of .2 and then JBoss and Jetty place nice with each other. ...

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 the GMS version of the phone. AT&T needs the competition to spread out the massive amount of users onto another network because frankly, they can't handle the amount of growth they've experienced. The iPhone is a great device, and I've had nothing but a positive experience for the most part with AT&T. ...

Installing MySQL should be a no brainer on any operating system, especially with how mature of a product it is. Apparently that assumption is incorrect. I tried installing the most recent GA release of MySQL on my new Snow Leopard machine, and found I couldn't start the blasted server. I've become lazy the older I get - I don't want to screw around with shell scripts, hacking this tweaking that. If I'm provided a Mac-based installer I WANT IT TO WORK. So, if you're like me and are frustrated as all hell with not being able to get MySQL to start via System Preferences after installing the 64-bit version (maybe 32-bit as well), do the following: ...

I may have mentioned it before, but I created a Migraine Diary application for the iPhone as my master's captone/thesis project. The school year finished out for me and I submitted the application to Apple on the 29th. Two days - TWO DAYS - later they approved it and it's listed in iTunes! Head on over to Net Workz LLC to find the app. I still have a lot of work left to do before I'm really happy with it. Help screens, more graphing, and encryption are two things I really need to get out there. Until then, enjoy!

Xcode has a build directory inside of your project, which you shouldn't be including in your source code management repository. Simply said, those files change so much and are "discardable". There is no way to easily exclude this directory from your repository. The accepted way to fix this (after some digging) is to simply move the build directory for Xcode to a temporary folder. To move the build directory, click on the Xcode menu in your menu bar, and click on Preferences. Change the folder under "Building" to a temporary folder. I created a tmp directory in my user folder. ...

Everyone is giving their two cents about the iPhone 3GS. I'm excited to see that Apple is releasing a faster phone that still feels like the first generation iPhone. Developers are used to a specific screen size for instance. Drastically changing the environment will create the discord other cell phone manufacturers feel when it comes to 3rd party applications. I do suspect, however, that next year will bring drastic change to the iPhone. Apple is still getting to where they really wanted the 1st generation iPhone to be. They realized that its easy to make their own hardware and software, but its hard when dealing with so many third parties. Cell phone carriers like AT&T stand in the way of real progress. Why doesn't Apple follow suit with Virgin and create their own private label cell phone company? I suspect that would give them a lot more flexibility in pricing and give them the ability to put whatever carrier they want behind the name. ...