ModCloth’s Fit for Me launch covered by CNet
Huge congratulations to our client ModCloth on launching Fit for Me!
Story-Centered Design
We like to get functional prototypes to stakeholders as early as possible in the development process. Prototypes help frame the discussion by putting features in context, helping teams make better design decisions and uncovering edge cases. In this excellent piece on story-centered design, Braden Kowitz describes an approach that moves that kind of discussion back […]
Frame geometry macros to improve your UIKit code
I find myself doing more and more dynamic UI layout in iOS apps these days. When elements of a UI need to resize to fit their contents, or move to accommodate other elements, the layout code can get complex and verbose. We’ve developed a set of Objective-C UIKit macros that help make this code more […]
Objective-C Singleton Pattern Updated For Testability
At Two Bit Labs we do a fair amount of unit testing. In places where we use singletons we use a variation on the the Objective-C dispatch_once pattern of thread safe singleton creation. This variation supports resetting the singleton or replacing it with a mock object. That way in our unit tests we can do […]
Objective-C Blocks Cheat Sheet
Blocks are an incredibly powerful addition to Objective-C, introduced in iOS 4. However, their syntax can be maddeningly difficult to remember. Matt Gallagher has an excellent post that breaks down the syntax to help you understand it. If you haven’t read this article, go do it now. Even after working with blocks for a while, […]
GSM 0338 encoding for SMS
Here’s a little Objective-C helper class we wrote to make it easier to convert NSString’s to GSM 03.38 encoding on the iPhone, iPad, or Mac: Handles stripping out characters not included in the GSM0338 character set Calculates the length of a GSM 0338 string (e.g. ^,[,|,etc each require 14 bits instead of 7 Gives you […]
Congrats to our client Bleacher Report on their acquisition by Time Warner’s TBS
Huge congratulations to our client Bleacher Report on their acquisition by Time Warner TBS
Kickstart your apps with the iOS Xcode Starter Project
We created the iOS Xcode Starter Project to make it quick and easy to start a new iPhone or iPad app. Our goal was to create a template to save the hours of effort it takes on a new project configuring essential open source libraries, the unit and functional testing environments, analytics, multiple targets, multiple […]
Block initialization for testability and reuse
Since Apple introduced block support in iOS 4, more and more APIs are moving from delegation to block callbacks. While block callbacks can be declared inline, in most cases you should initialize your block callback in a method that returns the block. This keeps the code that calls an external API succinct, allows you to […]
Toward a better “Rate this app”
If you’ve had an iPhone for any length of time, you’ve certainly had the experience of opening an app and facing a desperate plea for app store ratings. “Your reviews help other people find this app”, we’re told. And it’s true–app reviews and ratings are an important part of the app store ranking algorithm. Unfortunately, […]