OrchardNest

Today we released a new app, and it is probably not what you have come to expect from us. Hiding Spots is a brain training game, and it has an interesting story… The game itself opens with that story, albeit embellished for popular...

Toward the end of 2012, we released a novel new newsreader app called Cream. Cream was a no-fuss stream reader like many others; what made it special was that it used advanced learning algorithms to help sift through all the stories in...

Update 25th Feb 2015: Looks like Apple have addressed this. My tests now lead to two copies of conflicting files (eg. File and File 2) rather than two directories. This is similar to how Dropbox does it, and preferable in my view. Apple...

I find handling support pretty depressing at times. Most of the people writing in have a problem, are often angry, and you start to wonder why you even bother developing software. It’s worse when you are the sole developer, because...

At various times since its introduction three and half years ago, discussion has arisen over the viability of the Mac App Store (MAS). It’s flared up again in recent weeks, with a post by Milen Dzhumerov capturing the essence of the...

About a year ago, we released Mental Case 2 for iOS. Included in that release was a feature that many had been requesting for years: cloud sync. And whilst it worked reasonably well for most customers, it had some shortcomings. We felt...

The new Swift programming language announced by Apple at WWDC has generated some pretty heated discussions on public forums such as Twitter. I think this is a good thing: better to have people passionate, and hopefully providing the...

Seems like Apple is late again. Very late with their TV, and just plain late with the iWatch. For anyone following Apple for more than about 15 minutes, this is nothing new; even part of the game plan. Apple is always ‘late’ —...

With WWDC just around the corner, all developers in the Apple-sphere start to think about the future. What will Apple do next? And while most people are thinking about TVs and watches, I’ve been thinking about that old nugget — the...

I often hear developers new to unit testing express concern about how to deal with asynchronous operations. When I first began writing tests for Ensembles, I had the same concerns. In fact, testing asynchronous code is quite easy. First,...

When you are working on a relatively big project like Ensembles, you sometimes develop classes which have utility in a much broader range of projects than just the one you happen to be working on. That was the case with...

When we work with Cocoa, we are usually developing an app, and resources such as images can be stored in the application bundle. Xcode handles everything, and most of us don’t give a second thought to it. But what if you don’t...

A few weeks ago I was watching a rerun of one of Louis Theroux’s BBC Specials. It was an episode in which Louis revisited participants of an earlier series around a decade later, and centered on those active in the Porn Industry. As...

I have been following Brent Simmons’ diary on Vesper sync. It’s particularly interesting to me, because I am developing my own sync framework, and it helps to see how other developers solve similar problems, and possibly catch...

I’ve used Core Data in nearly all of the projects I have worked on in the last 8 years or so, but some aspects of the framework still remain a bit of a mystery to me. For example, the exact sequence of events that take place during a save...

Nick Heer had an interesting post pointing out that iWork has a new file format. This was subsequently picked up by Michael Tsai on his blog. The gist of the post is that Apple’s new format comprises many small binary files, which is...

I’ve been reading Ash Furrow’s new book Functional Reactive Programming on iOS. I’ve always had a vague idea of what Functional Programming (FP) was about, but this book, having been written for Objective-C programmers,...

Was just reading a new Brent Simmons’ blog post about how he is reinvestigating Core Data for the Vesper app. As someone who has used Core Data for years, and generally had good experiences, I was always a bit peeved when Brent...

by Drew McCormack Update: You can learn more about Ensembles at ensembles.io Earlier this month, I announced at iOSDevUK that I was working in my spare time on a new Core Data Synchronisation framework: Ensembles. Yesterday, while...

After a spate of articles on the topic, it’s been quite a while since I posted anything about iCloud/Core Data sync. To be honest, I hit some serious stumbling blocks, and ended up giving up on it entirely. I did end up shipping...