Articles

Weekly Roundup: Squircles

Aaron Brethorst • April 19, 2014

WWDC is fast approaching, and with it comes inevitable change. It seems highly likely that the next version of Mac OS X will feature an iOS-inspired, squircle-laden user interface overhaul. Meanwhile, the nascent wearables market is seeing one of its first casualties, with a scoop from CNet that Nike will be shutting down their F...

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Weekly Roundup: Memories of Safari

Aaron Brethorst • April 13, 2014

Once upon a time, Apple was no longer a "beleagured" computer maker, but also was not yet the world's most valuable maker of computers and consumer electronics. Mac OS X was downright lickable, and you'd use Internet Explorer 5 for Mac to browse the web from your toilet seat-looking iBook (mine ran at an acceptable 300MHz) while listening to MP3s downloaded from the recently defunct Napster. Maybe you'd burn some of them to CD to listen to on your Discman. Mac OS X's developer docume...

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Weekly Roundup: "No Sleep til Dub-Dub"

Aaron Brethorst • April 06, 2014

WWDC's dates were officially announced this week, and (thankfully!) the seemingly arbitrary system of the past for allocating tickets based upon whether you happened to wake up at the right time has been replaced with a far more fair lottery system. Last year I made a bingo card for the week's announcements, and my predictions were generally pretty good, although I am really bummed out that iOS 7 didn't include any nods towards ...

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Weekly Roundup: Work and Play

Aaron Brethorst • March 29, 2014

Did you know that Apple doesn't offer a tablet OS "that lets you work and play"? Yeah, I wasn't aware of that, either. Fortunately, our long nightmare of not being able to work and play on the iPad is finally over with this past week's release of

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Control of the Week: FXForms

Aaron Brethorst • March 29, 2014

FXForms

FXForms ...
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Weekly Roundup: My First Tweet

Aaron Brethorst • March 22, 2014

Over the past couple of years, I've developed a small arsenal of tools that are incredibly important for me as an iOS developer. Some are pretty obvious: GitHub, Instruments, Reflector, and Spark Inspector, for instance. Others are less well-known, or more subtle: GitHub's Objective-C trending page, objc.io, and......

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Control of the Week: RPSlidingMenu

Aaron Brethorst • March 22, 2014

RPSlidingMenu
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Weekly Roundup: Things I Have Learned

Aaron Brethorst • March 15, 2014

If you've been reading our weekly roundups for a while, now, you probably know that in addition to iOS development, the other thing I'm really passionate about is photography. I've been shooting at least a photo a day every day since Jaunary 1, 2013, and in that time I've learned a couple things that should be self-evident, but weren't necessarily to me at first.

Rule 1: Understand your tools and how they operate inside a...

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Weekly Roundup: "Listen to your users and respect them"

Aaron Brethorst • March 08, 2014

The best article I ran across this past week didn't directly have anything to do with Apple, iOS, or Mac OS X. Instead, it was a look at the fall of QuarkXPress, initially the best desktop publishing application available for personal computers, from the perspective of one of their users. The article reminded me of the inherent tenuousness of being on top. Everyone is out to get...

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Control of the Week: KFEpubKit

Aaron Brethorst • March 08, 2014

KFEpubKit

KFEpubKit
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Weekly Roundup: Tim Cook, TestFlight, and Toast

Aaron Brethorst • March 01, 2014

Thankfully, with the release of Mac OS X 10.9.2, last week's SSL crisis is over, and we can get back to wringing our hands about the impending death of TestFlight. The good folks at Apptentive have a pretty comprehensive list of replacement services that you might want to check out. Of late, I have been using

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Control of the Week: CRToast

Aaron Brethorst • March 01, 2014

CRToast

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CRToast
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Weekly Roundup: Goto Fail

Aaron Brethorst • February 22, 2014

If you haven't updated to iOS 7.0.6 and OS X 10.9.2 on all of your devices, drop everything and do it now.

Last week saw the release of iOS 6.1.6 and 7.0.6, which fix an incredibly simple and scary bug. The best writeup of it that I've seen so far comes from Adam Langley, a Senior Staff Software Engineer at Google, who notes the presence of an aptly named, and horrifically unnecessary goto fa...

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Weekly Roundup: "For Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose"

Aaron Brethorst • February 15, 2014

On August 6, 1997, Steve Jobs took the stage at MacWorld Expo to announce that "[we] have to let go of this notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose." He went on to introduce a smiling Bill Gates via satellite telecast in an absurd, ostensibly unintentional recreation of the famous 1984 ad.

As it works out, Steve was absolutely right. In May 2010, Apple's market cap passed Microsoft's. And then, for the first time ever,

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