Getting Organised

Show notes from episode 42 of iDeveloperLive podcast recorded on 13 February 2012

Introduction

• Chaos of paperwork
• Scotty’s comments about my desk
• Xero
• Missing deadlines

Cutting Out The Papers

• Only keep papers that really need to be kept, things such as legal documents.
• Scan everything else as soon as you can.
• Don’t try to scan historic papers at first.
• Store the scanned documents in appropriate places as soon as you can.
• Stop printing things.
• Stop scribbing notes on bits of paper.

Scanners

• Don’t use a flatbed scanner.
• In early December Fraser Speirs tweeted about looking for and then buying a scanner. Got a Canon P-150 over a ScanSnap S1300 because it has TWAIN drivers available.
• Bought a Canon DR-2010M because a desktop scanner suits me fine.
• P-150 replaced by P-215.
• Can also consider the Fuji SnapScan scanners.
• Look out for M-versions. Mac software.
• Canon scanner comes with CaptureOnTouch.

Making Notes

• More paper. Lots of bits.
• Mac, iPad and iPhone.
• Stylus - Wacom Bamboo
• Software -
• One paper notebook.

Stop Printing

• Instapaper, Kindle, Evernote.
• Second monitor or an iPad.

Business Cards

• Don’t give them out and don’t accept them.
• Ask people to email you their details.
• Note their Twitter name and send them a message.
• iPhone app suggestions from the chat room.

Storing Information

• Picking an application or applications.
• Evernote and OmniFocus.
• Backups

Top Tips

• Backups.
• Create a routine of scanning and shredding papers.
• Find and stick with an application or applications.
• Remove Post-Its, pads, etc. Stop writing notes or at least use just one notebook.
• Take it slowly and don’t expect on over-night change. Don’t worry about the backlog for now.

AVFoundation Overview

Introduction

A couple of weeks ago I was on the iDeveloperLive podcast speaking about AVFoundation. The actual conversation veered way from the nodes I’d made in advance and from what I had intended to cover so I thought it was worth publishing the notes which you can find below.

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Indigestible

Digestive, the replacement for my original Bento database manager, has been languishing in a state of limbo for, well years. I've tried to kick-start the project several times and I'm sorry to say that I'm now admitting defeat and abandoning the project.

Before I explain the reasons I will say that Bento users are not left high and dry. Bento itself incorporates an alternative startup system which allows you to select alternative databases. Simply hold down the Alt key when you launch Bento and you'll see it.

As to why I'm abandoning Digestive, well there are three main reasons. The first is that it wouldn't add much more to the built-in, albeit hidden, launch preferences mentioned above. The second is that OS X Lion's sandboxing and the App Store approval process probably wouldn't look kindly upon an application that tinkers with another application's preferences. The final reason is simply that I don't use Bento any more and developing an application you have no interest in is incredibly difficult.

I'd like to apologise to everyone who had been waiting for Digestive but officially pulling the plug is better than leaving it all in limbo any longer.

Lion and XIB Internal Inconsistencies

If you have developed a Mac application and Xcode 4 under Lion starts to complain that a XIB file contains internal inconsistencies then you may need to remove a couple of items from your toolbar.

The alert looks like this:

Apple decided to remove the Customize Toolbar and the Separator toolbar items in Lion. From the Max OS X Lion release Notes:

In 10.7, the Customize Toolbar item and the Separator item (with the vertical dots) have been removed from toolbars and customization palettes, and their item identifiers are ignored.

Deleting these items from your toolbar should solve the problem but if it doesn’t then it would be worth committing your XIB in your version control system, taking a snapshot of the project or making a copy of the XIB file and deleting each toolbar item in turn, selecting a different file in Xcode and then re-selecting your XIB until the offending item is found. You can then restore your XIB and just handle the individual problem item.

This has worked for me and a couple of other people but if it doesn’t work for you please post a comment and, if you find one, the solution, to help others.

Xcode and the Developer Tools Group

If the account you use for development is not an administrative account you will be asked to enter the name and password for a user who is in the Developer Tools group once per login. To get around this you can add your account's username to the _developer group.

1. To make life simple log in to an administrative account
2. Launch Terminal
3. Type: sudo dscl . append /Groups/_developer GroupMembership <username>
4. Quit Terminal and log out of the administrative account

Backups and Xcode 4 Build Files

Xcode 4 recommends storing your build products in a derived data location. This location stores a fair amount of data and can grow pretty large (it’s over 4GB for me at the moment) so it may be worth excluding it from some of your backups, particularly versioned ones. I’ll continue to keep a copy in the clone that SuperDuper! creates but exclude it from Time Machine and Arq backups.

The derived data location is:

~/Library/Developer/Xcode/DerivedData

NSConference 2011

I’ve just returned home from NSConference, a conference for Mac and iOS developers. Rather than recapping what actually went on (and Alex Blewitt has posted some excellent notes about day 1, day 2 and day 3 on his blog) I thought I’d offer some general comments and opinions which may help waverers decide if they want to go in the future.

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Switching Between XML and SQLite in Core Data

Of the four data storage formats which Core Data on OS X supports some developers may use two: XML and SQLite. XML can be great when you are developing your application and want to have a look at what Core Data is storing whilst SQLite is more memory friendly and is generally used in shipping applications (the XML format is easy to read in a text editor but more memory hungry because it loads all of the data into memory). Note: After initially publishing this post I received some feedback on Twitter about the perils of using an XML data store. This is covered in a section at the end of this post.

If the initial development was done using the XML store the developer will at some point throw away the existing test data and reconfigure the NSPersistentStoreCoordinator to use SQLite and then stick with that format. Whilst third-party tools exist which allow you to examine the data in the SQLite data store it easy to toggle between XML and SQLite using Core Data itself. This not only allows you to examine the data easily but it also means that when you transition from XML to SQLite you need not lose any data, possibly important if you have alpha or even beta testers using your application.

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"Can I Peel The Film Off?"

I bought a Kindle a few weeks ago and, following on from my earlier post about why I was getting one, here’s what I now think of it.

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Aquapac

One thing I mentioned in my original post about only buying eBook versions of reference books was that I was getting a Kindle so that I could read eBooks in the bath and that if I dropped it then it would be far less costly than dunking an iPad. Several recommendations and suggestions were made about how to keep my Kindle dry if the worst did happen, a popular one being to use a ziplock bag as propsed by Jeff Bezos. However a more interesting suggestion was one to buy an Aquapac.

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