Let’s say you’re making HTTP requests and handling responses as we described last time. Parsing the results is usually pretty easy, but what happens when you have a large blob of data, be it XML or JSON or whatever? Any lengthly processing on the main thread, more than a couple hundred milliseconds, will introduce a [...]
It’s common for iPhone apps to need to make HTTP requests and receive results in either JSON or XML format. There are several excellent full-featured tools ( ASIHTTPRequest, RestKit, etc.) to help you with this task, but sometimes all you need is NSURLConnection. NSURLConnection is a simple class that provides easy to use high-level asynchronous [...]
This week marks the 3rd anniversary of the App Store launch. It sounds, and feels like a lifetime ago. It’s sometimes hard to remember how “unconnected” our lives were before the iPhone, but I can say that prior to June of 2007 I absolutely hated every cell phone I owned. There was the Qualcomm clunker, [...]
The new shiny is here. At the annual WWDC recently, Apple unveiled three widely-anticipated new products. This year it was all about software, so hardware announcements will have to come later. In the keynote Steve Jobs mentioned OS X Lion, iOS 5, and iCloud. If you’re an iOS or Mac developer these changes will have [...]
The annual pilgrimage to San Francisco is underway this week. I figure I’ve attended about a dozen in the past 21 years. All have indeed been awesome. Many long-time attendees seem to have mastered the week-long partying and a few have even published “survival guides.” My goal is not to get as many free drinks [...]
I ran into an odd issue the other day and spent a little time getting to the bottom of it. It turns out I wasn’t taking good care of my Xcode project’s library search paths. Here’s what I had to do about it and why you might care. Note this problem has likely been lurking [...]
Like pay-to-play or in-app ads, prompting for a rating is controversial in that some developers frown upon it. Free apps tend to have an average 3 star rating. People rarely bother to go back to the App Store to rate an app. There’s always a small minority that will go out of their way to [...]
A quick peek at the calendar reveals that it is exactly three months since my first iDevBlogADay post. Thus it’s time to relinquish my spot and move to the back of the list (thanks, @mysterycoconut!) so some other patient indie can have a turn. This has been a good exercise to get me writing again. [...]
Last weekend I had the privilege to be able to attend the inaugural 360MacDev conference in Denver. While many readers may only be beginning to think about deploying apps on OS X, there are many developers out there who’ve been happily making a living doing so for years. The overlap, or synergy, if you will, [...]
As every seasoned iPhone developer knows, the Christmas season is Big. Retailers, online and physical, make most of their annual revenue in the fourth quarter. It’s not quite that lopsided for iDevs, but the rewards can be great, both before and after Christmas. As everyone knows now, Apple shuts off access to the iTunes Connect [...]
