Development

A collection of 21 posts

Tutorial

Installing Fetch with Cydia Impactor

Fetch has been open source since it was removed by Apple from the App Store but the overhead of installing has always been large since it required not only a Mac but also knowledge of Xcode. I recently discovered Cydia Impactor [http://www.cydiaimpactor.com] which allows for easy install

iPhone

Removing the White Bars in Safari on iPhone X

The new iPhone X features a beautiful edge-to-edge display. Well, almost. There is the small issue of a notch at the top of the browser which doesn't cause an issue when viewing websites in portrait but by default does cause some issues in landscape. To accommodate the notch

Development

Setapp: Game Changing App Distribution

Distribution for indie developers on the Mac has been a sore point for a number of years now. The Mac App Store is just completely broken and discovery of apps outside of a centralised store is difficult and it takes a lot of effort to shine in the rough. Setapp

OS X

QBlocker

A few months ago I switched from Chrome to Safari as my main browser. I enjoy using Safari to Chrome in almost every way but there was one feature of Chrome that I missed. There's an option you can enable in Chrome that will force you to hold

iOS

Fetch 2

Last year I started working on my first iOS app as a way to learn Swift. What I built turned out to be a fairly popular client for Put.io. With the release of the Apple TV, porting the app was a no brainer and with it came additional features

Swift Featured

Decoding Dreamweaver STE files with Swift

We have a few clients that use Dreamweaver as their editor/FTP client of choice. This unfortunately doesn't fit in with our toolchain and as we often receive STE files [https://helpx.adobe.com/dreamweaver/using/import-export-dreamweaver-site-settings.html] it's a manual process to extract the data

Swift Featured

Content blockers are easy. Content blockers are hard.

So today, Mr. Crumble [http://getmrcrumble.com] — Cocoon's latest app — is out. It's a content blocker for iOS 9 but unlike other content blockers it's not bothered about ads but instead it targets those annoying EU cookie banners. Building a content blocker is both

Swift

Make UILabel Copyable in Swift

I've been working on an iOS app that called for some text to be copyable but not editable. I wanted to able to long-press and have the contextual menu show the "Copy" action. I'd initially thought about using a UITextField and disabling the edit

Swift

Swift "AnyClass" Type

TL;DR you're looking for MyClass.self When working with ConnectSDK, I came across something I hadn't before in Swift: the AnyClass type. ConnectSDK [http://connectsdk.com] is an Objective-C based library so I'd imagine this is a rarity when working with native Swift

Swift

Creating a Delegate in Swift

The Delegate pattern is one that's widely used is developing apps for iOS and OS X and it's one that's very simple to implement in Swift. It's primarily used to alert classes of changes or interactions in other instances. For example, UITableView&

Quick Tip

Quick Tip: Globally Changing iOS Tint Colour In Swift

One of the ways an app can be customised easily in iOS is to change its tint colour. This can be done for specific elements such as your navigation bar in your storyboard. However, this can also be changed globally for your entire application — here's how. From Storyboard

Development Featured

Customising Xcode

I've been using Xcode more and more lately after picking up a couple of iOS and OS X apps. For some reason though, it took me until yesterday to finally get around to customising the thing. 1. Alcatraz - Xcode's missing package manager Every decent text

Development Featured

Replicating Beme's Proximity-Record in Swift

If you haven't seen Beme [http://beme.com] yet, you've probably been living under a rock. It's Casey Neistat's [https://twitter.com/caseyneistat] new video creation application that uses doesn't show you what you're recording. I've

Development

Creating a sharedInstance in Swift

Or, "How the fuck to I make a singleton?" One of the patterns that seems to be very common in Cocoa is the sharedInstance pattern. You can see it in a few of the native classes to UIKit and Cocoa. For example: * In UIApplication you havesharedApplication which returns

Development

WordPress Social Stream

About 3 years ago now, we were working on a site for a client and came up with the idea to merge their Facebook and Twitter feeds with the news posts on their site to keep things feeling fresher for longer. Since then I've rebuilt the bloody thing

Development Featured

Swift, iOS & OS X Programming

For years I put off learning how to make iOS apps. Ever since their introduction, back when iOS was called iPhone OS, I wanted to craft something but Objective-C and its obscurity put me off. The syntax was ugly and the naming conventions weren't what I was used

Development

Multi-Line Padded Text With Background and Line Spacing

==Update May 2017: Matt Brunt [https://twitter.com/Brunty] pointed me to a lovely hack using box-shadow [http://codepen.io/anon/pen/eWGLEM] which you should probably totally use instead of the 2-year-old method below. I've been working on a project that called for some text to be

Development

Gulp, AngularJS and html5Mode

To make your AngularJS app feel a little nicer you've probably enabled html5Mode to remove the annoying hashbang from your URIs. However, this can present some issues when trying to test the site locally. And, unless you've been living under a rock for the past year

Development

Stop ng-repeat auto-sorting your objects in AngularJS 1.3

I was working on a project that called for an object to be used with ng-repeat. By default Angular orders this alphabetically but this wasn't what we wanted in the project at all. As it turns out there's no way to stop this in AngularJS 1.

Development

Animating or transitioning view changes in AngularJS

Since AngularJS 1.2.0 we've had the ability to do native animations in Angular using CSS classes, transitions and keyframes. I've been working on a site recently where it called for transitions to be used between view changes heavily. Thankfully this is made really easy

Development Featured

Setup a new Mac in 5 minutes

I've just taken proud ownership of a shiny new iMac which meant I had the (dis)pleasure of downloading all of my applications and setting up my development environment. I thought this would be the usual manual process but thanks to Homebrew [http://brew.sh/] and Homebrew Cask