Posts Tagged 'iPhone'

Here’s a nice start on remote configurability you might look at for adding into your apps:

mattt / GroundControl

Break free of the two-week tyranny of the App Store approval process!

Many developers don’t realize that they are allowed to remotely control the behavior of their app (provided that the application isn’t downloading any new code).

GroundControl gives you a dead-simple way to remotely configure your app, allowing you to add things like feature flags, impromptu A/B tests, or a simple “message of the day”…

We’ve got pretty much exactly the same thing as a feature at the day job, and why yes it’s pretty darn handy to be able to patch, extend, or completely replace the functionality and display of a particular app on the fly. Where by “pretty darn handy” we mean “if you buy us a martini or seven and swear to keep silent, boy do we ever have some stories for YOU…” But any-ways, point is here, if there is anything that you can foresee might need changing on your app that doesn’t require new code, it would be very forward-looking of you to consider integrating something along the lines of this piece!

h/t: ManiacDev!

Now this looks like a downright lifesaver for all those of you who oversee a framework that powers a dozen team apps and counting with several hundred individual skinned and themed images going into each …

… oh, wait, that’s just us, is it? Well, no matter how many images you need to check, this’ll help:

angelolloqui / AGImageChecker

AGImageChecker is a lightweight iOS library that helps developers to find problems in their used images. It detects when images are smaller or different sized than their container views, producing resized or blurry images. Wrong images will have a colorfull border that helps you to detect them. Additionally, it adds a long press gesture to open an image detail and check useful information about the problem, such as the image size, the view size, the contentMode, the presence of retina version, the associated view controlller,… All of it out of the box, without changing your code (device and simulator)…

That’s some handy diagnostics, indeed.

Speaking of images, if you need some handy placeholders during development, nowhere better to go than {placekitten}…

…because everyone’s day is happier with kittens in it!

h/t: @cocoapods!

Here’s a library of language extensions worth looking into:

jspahrsummers / libextobjc : “A Cocoa library to extend the Objective-C programming language.”

The Extended Objective-C library extends the dynamism of the Objective-C programming language to support additional patterns present in other dynamic programming languages (including those that are not necessarily object-oriented) … libextobjc currently includes the following features:

• Safe categories, using EXTSafeCategory, for adding methods to a class without overwriting anything already there (identifying conflicts for you).
• Concrete protocols, using EXTConcreteProtocol, for providing default implementations of the methods in a protocol.
• Simpler and safer key paths, using EXTKeyPathCoding, which automatically checks key paths at compile-time.
• Compile-time checking of selectors to ensure that an object declares a given selector, using EXTSelectorChecking.
• Easier use of weak variables in blocks, using @weakify, @unsafeify, and @strongify from the EXTScope module.
• Safer private methods, using EXTPrivateMethod, for declaring methods on a class, and getting notified if they conflict with other existing methods.
• Scope-based resource cleanup, using @onExit in the EXTScope module, for automatically cleaning up manually-allocated memory, file handles, locks, etc., at the end of a scope.
• EXTNil, which is like NSNull, but behaves much more closely to actual nil (i.e., doesn’t crash when sent unrecognized messages).
• Synthesized properties for categories, using EXTSynthesize.
• Algebraic data types generated completely at compile-time, defined using EXTADT.
• …

Some pretty cool stuff there, yeppers. @onExit in particular looks like it remedies the only thing we occasionally miss about C++, stack-declared resource management wrapper classes. Even if you’re not chomping at the bit for any of this stuff though, digging around the implementation mechanics is extremely educational. Lots of material for Truly Evil™ interview questions here, indeed.

h/t: @JSpahrSummers!

So there you were squealing “DADD-EE, I want a PONY for my debugging!” and why look what those super helpful folk over at Square have come up with for you:

PonyDebugger: Remote Debugging Tools for Native iOS Apps

PonyDebugger is a remote debugging toolset that operates as a client library and gateway server combination using Chrome Developer Tools on a web browser to debug an application’s network traffic and data store. We began by implementing an iOS client library to debug our application’s network traffic sent via NSURLConnection and its Core Data stack. To get started, check out the GitHub repository.

Improved network traffic debugging is always handy, although our QA department has been managing to get by with Charles, but wait, what? “And its Core Data stack?”

Core Data Browser

Another cool feature of PonyDebugger is its ability to remotely debug an iOS application’s Core Data stack. By registering managed object contexts, a user can browse all of their entities, properties and drill-down relationships through Chrome’s IndexedDB browser.

The great advantage is that it doesn’t require access to nor implementation of an SQLite data store. This means that browsing data is easy, whether through the Simulator or on a real device. There’s also no difference between tracking an in-memory object store or an object store that has a SQLite persistent store, as it interacts directly with an NSManagedObjectContext.

Woah. How does that work?

How It Works

The WebKit Web Inspector, which Chrome Developer Tools is heavily based on, implements a protocol that defines all of the commands, events and types that each debugger “domain” implements. For example, the network debugging feature is implemented by communicating events and commands with Inspector’s Network Domain protocol.

Chrome Developer Tool’s Remote Debugging API exposes and documents (part of) its API for developers to communicate their own data to its developer tools application. We created an iOS client that implements this protocol and communicates a native iOS application’s network requests and managed objects to the developer tools through a WebSocket connection.

Well, that gets our Totally Awesome Award 2012 Edition™ hands down. Well deserved kudos to the authors for their great work and Square for open sourcing it for the rest of us!

h/t: @olebegmann! (And why yes pretty much all the rest of you reading this too, but we saw his tweet first.)

UPDATE:

Tool/Library Providing An F-Script Like Shell For Tweaking iOS Apps Remotely is a nicely complementary tool.

Oooh, this is an extra special helpful tip for those annoyingly untraceable ‘unrecognized selector sent to instance’ annoyances:

Quick and easy debugging of unrecognized selector sent to instance

… All you need to do is pop over to the Breakpoint Navigator, click the + button at the bottom and choose Add Symbolic Breakpoint…

In the Symbol field enter this symbol:

-[NSObject(NSObject) doesNotRecognizeSelector:]

Now when any instance of any object within your program is sent a message to which it does not respond you will be presented with a backtrace that takes you right to the point where that message was sent…

Cool beans! That’s the first time in quite a while we’ve run over something worth adding to our standard breakpoint collection of

malloc_error_break

objc_exception_throw

_NSAutoreleaseNoPool

_objc_fatal

+[NSException raise:format:]

Any other breakpoints on your essentials list, Dear Readers?

h/t: iOS Dev Weekly!

If you’re looking around for an open source 3D engine to mess with, here’s a new option:

Kraken Engine

Kraken Engine is an open source graphics / game engine written in C++ with OpenGL ES 2.0. It targets iOS devices (iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch) and is designed to be cross platform. It supports some features not found in most mobile engines:

• Per-pixel phong lighting with specular maps, diffuse maps, and DOT3 normal mapping
• Both forward rendering and deferred lighting pipelines
• Multiple point and directional lights per scene
• Post-processing effects such as vignetting and Depth of Field
• Real-time shadow mapping with PSSM (Parallel Split Shadow Maps)
• Asset pipeline imports objects, materials and scene graph directly from Autodesk FBX files

Still under heavy development, but if that looks interesting, check out the code here!