Articles

edit: It's worth noting that I write these on the Saturday before they're published, and they are sent out to our mailing list every Monday or Tuesday. Sign up in the yellow box above to get the roundup early in your email every week.

I know that Cocoa Controls is supposed to be all about iOS and OS X software development, and I was actually all set to talk about how Apple's iBeacon technology is going to be their big sleeper hit technology of 2014 and 2015, but that...

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Apologies for the lack of content this past week. I spent most of it back in Minnesota and Wisconsin visiting family. For those of you outside the United States, Minnesota and Wisconsin are located in the north central part of the country. Minnesota is probably best known as being the Land of 10,000 Lakes (really there are 11,842 larger than 40,000 square meters) the home of Prince, the musician, and the place where Spam is made. Wisconsin is the birthplace of Dungeons & Dragons, the large...

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Change can be incredibly difficult to sell to your users. They have their set ways of using your product, with months or years of experience guiding them towards accomplishing tasks. When you pull the rug out from under them by making your software look and behave differently, you upset their expectations, reset their muscle memory, and face an uphill battle to convince them of the greater utility of what you have created.

Take the Office 2007 Ribbon fiasco, for instance. Personally,...

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If you've been around the iOS world for a while, you've undoubtedly heard folks grumbling (or you've done some grumbling of your own) about the typical state of Apple's sample code. Don't get me wrong, there are occasionally absolute gems, like UIImage+ImageEffects (which has probably been added to half of the apps on the App Store today...), but it seems like these are few and far in between. One of the biggest omissions, in my opinion, has been the lack of sample code from Apple demonstratin...

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The Apple of 2014 is clearly not the same company that it once was. Tim Cook said back in 2011 that Steve Jobs' last words of advice for him were, "never ask what [Steve] would do, just do what's right." The modern Apple is a company that is ruthless about reinventing itself. It releases lower margin products that cannibalize sales of higher margin cash cows. It creates expansive redesigns ...

I spent all of last week in San Francisco for Apple's 25th Worldwide Developers Conference, and, like many others, I was absolutely floored by what I saw. In two ways, I think this was the most important WWDC I've ever experienced.

First, and perhaps most importantly, are signs of Apple opening up. This manifested itself in myriad ways, ranging from the speed at which Apple posted WWDC session videos, to the relaxation of the NDA around topics discussed in the keynote, to some of the...

With one week until WWDC, the rumor mill is continuing to churn out some of the oddest grist I've seen in recent memory. First, there are the entirely logical and believable rumors, like that Apple will be updating the look and feel of OS X to more closely resemble iOS 7 (well, iOS 8, I suppose).

Then there are the perennial favorites, like Apple adding NFC to the ne...

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WWDC starts two weeks from Monday. Are you going to be in San Francisco for that week? Let me know, I'd love to see as many people who read Cocoa Controls as possible! I'll be in the Bay Area from Sunday, June 1 to Friday, June 6.

Best,
Aaron

What We're Reading

• Design
  • iOS HIG is now available on iBooks
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Apple's buying Beats? For $3.2 billion? What?! It begs the question why Apple would be interested in purchasing a nascent streaming company instead of one of the bigger dogs, like Rdio or Spotify, but I'm sure Tim Cook et al have their reasons. Ostensibly the purchase price can't matter that much. So it must be something else. Beats also has a popular line of hardware, and two of the b...

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Last week, an article entitled Programming Sucks made the rounds in my circles. If you haven't seen it yet, I highly recommend dropping everything and spending the next 15 minutes reading it. Although it adopts a somewhat tongue-in-cheek, hyperbolic attitude towards the failings of our craft, there is enough truth in passages like the following to make me simultaneously laugh, cry, and die a little inside:

You i...

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update: Brent is now maintaining a canonical list of all Vesper Sync Diary entries.

In case you've missed any part of Brent Simmon's fantastic series of articles on adding Core Data sync support to Vesper, I've taken the trouble of rolling up links to all of the articles below. I hope they're as useful for you as they've been for me.

Brent Simmons continued his absolutely fantastic series of blog posts this past week with one entitled Atom XHTML Content Considered Jerky, which reminded me of one of my favorite phrases of all time: "coding in anger." As far as I can tell, the term originated with David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of Ruby on Rails, in a blog ...