Do You Find The Whole Planning Process Painful? Nov 09, 2016 A thread in the AskPrograming forum on reddit started with this question and I thought I would share my thoughts on planning and up-front design. Basically, the originator of the thread is expressing his dislike of planning before coding, but thinks it’s a good idea because they’ve either been told that or seen others do it. They also expresses dislike for planning tools and wonders if there’s a better way. Basically, they want to know how do you plan and how do you break up a project into tasks that you need to do. ...
Part 4: What Are the Downsides to Putting the Core Data MOC in the App Delegate Nov 01, 2016 In part 3, I talked about why putting the MOC in the app delegate makes any code that uses the MOC will be dependent on the app delegate and why that’s not a good thing. In part 2, I talked about why putting the MOC in the app delegate is a violation of the Single Responsibility Principle. In part 1, I talked about why putting the MOC in your app delegate makes you dependent on Core Data for your application’s persistence. ...
Part 3: What Are The Downsides to Putting the Core Data MOC in the App Delegate Oct 25, 2016 In part 2, I talked about why putting the MOC in the app delegate is a violation of the Single Responsibility Principle. In part 1, I talked about why putting the MOC in your app delegate makes you dependent on Core Data for your application’s persistence. Today I like to talk about the 3rd reason I gave in part 1, which is: Any code you write that uses myManagedObjectContext will be dependent on the App Delegate. ...
Part 2: What Are The Downsides to Putting the Core Data MOC in the App Delegate Oct 18, 2016 In my previous post, I gave some reasons why putting the Core Data MOC in your app delegate was a bad idea. Those reasons were: The app delegate is managing the Core Data stack. Classes should only have one responsibility. The app delegate is already responsible for managing application lifecycle. It shouldn’t be managing the Core Data stack as well. You are completely dependent on Core Data and using it as your persistence method for your app. ...
Swift Robot Arm Oct 11, 2016 In a previous post, I wrote about controlling my OWI robot arm with Elixir. Well, I decided to port that to Swift! In that post, there’s a link to some code that does it in Objective-C with IOKit. I first tried to just do a straight port and use IOKit in Swift. That didn’t work to well. The IOKit API is an old Core Foundation library and even has some old COM style APIs. ...
3 Ways To Fix Your iOS Testing Woes Oct 03, 2016 Lots of companies have constant problems testing their iOS apps. Here are some ways to fix or ease them. 1. Don’t Make Developers Run or Write UI Tests UI tests are black box tests and test the app from the perspective of the user. Your developers are the worst choice to test the app from this viewpoint and you need a fresh set of eyes for those tests. The QA engineer’s job is to test the app from the user’s viewpoint. ...
What are the Downsides to Putting the Core Data MOC in the App Delegate? Aug 25, 2016 I saw this question on the iOSProgramming topic in reddit: I’ve seen a number of different ways to access the NSManagedObjectContext when working with Core Data, but I was wondering if there are any downsides to the way I’ve been doing it. Basically, I stick a computed variable in the AppDelegate, and grab it when I need it… Please let me know if you see any flaws… If not, feel free to use it! ...
Elixir Robots May 22, 2015 My robot hobby is picking up steam. After going through the Python examples that came with the GoPiGo, I got inspired by some embedded Erlang videos on YouTube and decided to see if I could control the GoPiGo with Elixir. After watching Elixir Sips, I learned of a project called Elixir/Ale, an Elixir library for embedded programming. With Elixir/Ale, you can talk to the GPIO ports on the Raspberry Pi and some common hardware bus protocols: I2C and SPI. ...
Robots! Robots! Robots! May 14, 2015 I’ve been getting into robots lately. For a long time I was searching for the perfect robot kit to use with my Arduino. Then I decided I’d rather use my Raspberry Pi to control my robots so I could use better programming languages like Clojure, Elixir, Scala, Ruby, etc. So I was looking around for the perfect Raspberry Pi robot kit. For Christmas, my parents gave me the OWI Robotic Arm Edge. ...
Sticky Footers with UITableView Feb 16, 2015 The Problem Last week, I had to implement sticky footers in a table view. Sticky footers are where the footer comes at the end of all the table contents, but if the contents are such that the scrollable content height of the table view is less than the height of the view, the footer will still appear at the bottom of the view. A non-sticky footer A sticky footer I searched for a solution to this, but all I found were solutions where the footer was always at the bottom of the view. ...