• Reflections on a month with Ting's mobile phone service

    In mid-April, I switched over to Ting, a cellular service provider from Tucows that promises lower bills and greater control over usage. One month, and a pleasantly low $45 bill later, here are my impressions. Important note: I have not been paid by Ting for this post. But after a...
  • Adaptive vs Responsive Design - A super quick overview

    In this mobile-heavy world, making sure your website works for a variety of different form-factors is of ever-growing importance. Having a central column fixed at 1024 pixels wide just won't cut it any more. Both adaptive and responsive design provide their own solution to this problem, but researching them online...
  • How to break your UIView with nothing but a background queue

    I recently found myself tearing my hair out over some very odd behaviours in XCode. Giving focus to a text view wasn't bringing up the keyboard, but I could still type where the keyboard should have appeared. I spent days trying various tweaks and changes to get it working, blaming...
  • XCode Missing a Spot when Cleaning Builds

    Found myself with something of a head-scratcher today. After pulling some changes from an iOS project, I fired it up in XCode only to get an error: Property <property name> not found on object of type __strong <object type> I carefully scanned the offending line for typos and couldn't see...
  • TEQuickPageViewController v2: Even Simpler Paging

    A couple of weeks ago, I put together a CocoaPod to make creating paged views in iOS easier. I knew there was a bit of some for improvement, so I did some research and today I pushed version 2.0.0 of TEQuickPageViewController, which makes storyboarding your pages even quicker! Having discovered...
  • Simpler paging in iOS

    Yesterday, I started wrestling with the concept of Page View Controllers in iOS. These are the swipeable sets of screens you've probably seen holding tutorials and "what the heck is this?" explanations for all those weird and trendy apps floating around. Frankly, I found it to be a massive pain...
  • IQKeyboardManager: My new favourite iOS library

    I rarely get excited about code libraries, but IQKeyboardManager is probably the most useful and useable library I've ever had the pleasure of downloading. Useable in that it requires zero effort to use, no code, no configuration, no API keys. And useful because it solves a problem that has been bugging...
  • Redis on Laravel: Why naming is a pain

    It's Thursday night, and you're looking to start using Redis in your Laravel application. You fire up your Homestead box (more on this in another post), open your favourite IDE and put in a new route to start playing around. Just something simple to start, write then read a value,...
  • Clone the Classics - Space Invaders with Swift and SpriteKit

    Following on the heels of Asteroids with Sprite Kit, the introduction of the Swift language made me feel like another crack at the whip. So here's my take on Space Invaders. This time, I went for OS X as a platform, again using SpriteKit, but this time using Swift as the...
  • Test your Twitter Vocabulary

    Time for another quick project! This time, I've put together a vocabulary tester for Twitter. Just put in your twitter handle, and get an outline of your most used and longest words. The app is implemented under Laravel, using the Twitter APIs to pull tweets for processing. To get around potential...

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