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TOLL is available now! An action-thriller novel — book 2 in the KESTREL series. ★★★★★ — Amazon Earlier this week, Apple announced and previewed iOS 7. As widely expected, it sports a new interface aesthetic characterised by strong, simple lines, areas filled with flat or gradient colours, and a lack of ornamentation. I’d like to discuss some aspects of the new UI style here, in comparison to iOS 6

TOLL is available now! An action-thriller novel — book 2 in the KESTREL series. ★★★★★ — Amazon I’ve been blogging for almost eleven years, and I’ve been writing at this domain for almost nine. In that time, I’ve used several different blogging platforms (blosxom, b2, one I made myself called Thistle, WordPress, and now Octopress), and I’ve redesigned my blog about once every couple of years. I rec

TOLL is available now! An action-thriller novel — book 2 in the KESTREL series. ★★★★★ — Amazon For me, Nintendo has always been the gold standard in gaming. I’ve not been without a Nintendo console in decades now, and I’m an enormous fan of the Zelda, Mario and Metroid series (and F-Zero, and Animal Crossing, and Starfox, and so on). With today’s powerful Mac (and PC) hardware, we can rediscover a

TOLL is available now! An action-thriller novel — book 2 in the KESTREL series. ★★★★★ — Amazon One of the development tasks I do most often is designing the API for a reusable component. The components are usually for iOS (though sometimes they’re for OS X), and are invariably GUI controls or views of some kind. I’ve designed literally dozens of component APIs over the years, including for clients

TOLL is available now! An action-thriller novel — book 2 in the KESTREL series. ★★★★★ — Amazon I’m pleased to announce the release of MGTileMenu, an open source iOS GUI component providing a pop-up tile-based contextual menu. It’s designed for iOS 5, and uses ARC. It supports Retina and non-Retina devices, and works with VoiceOver. MGTileMenu is designed for use on iPad, but it will also work on i

TOLL is available now! An action-thriller novel — book 2 in the KESTREL series. ★★★★★ — Amazon iPhone developers are familiar with having to provide artwork at both regular and Retina (doubled) pixel dimensions for their apps. With rumours of a Retina Display-equipped iPad being just around the corner, it’s wise to consider moving to fully scaleable vector artwork for as much of your app’s images

TOLL is available now! An action-thriller novel — book 2 in the KESTREL series. ★★★★★ — Amazon Traditionally, developers aren’t great designers, and vice versa. There are many exceptions (ahem), but generally the art of one group is a mystery to the other - yet we routinely have to collaborate on projects. As someone who has worked in both areas, I’ve put together a list of tips for designers, on

TOLL is available now! An action-thriller novel — book 2 in the KESTREL series. ★★★★★ — Amazon If you’re a developer of either Mac or iOS apps that use networking, there’s a new feature in the Developer Tools for Mac OS X 10.7 “Lion” (read my review of it at The Guardian) which will be useful to you. This brief article describes how it works. First, you’ll want to get the Hardware IO Tools for Xco

TOLL is available now! An action-thriller novel — book 2 in the KESTREL series. ★★★★★ — Amazon Ensuring that your iPhone or iPad app is accessible (in this case, to visually impaired users) is the right thing to do, and thankfully it’s very easy - in many cases, there’s no work to do at all. This article for iOS developers describes how to implement accessibility support. Update: I’ve been informe

MGSplitViewController is an open source replacement for UISplitViewController, with various useful enhancements. Here’s a demonstration video hosted on YouTube. It’s better if you watch it in full HD. Donations I wrote MGSplitViewController for my own use, but I’m making it available (as usual) for the benefit of the iOS developer community, because I care about this community and about the platfo

TOLL is available now! An action-thriller novel — book 2 in the KESTREL series. ★★★★★ — Amazon Within the last twelve to eighteen months, I’ve crossed a threshold whereby the vast majority of my work is now aimed at touch-screen devices. I often have to sketch out feature specs, interaction designs and so forth, and I enjoy working on paper whenever I can. I quickly encountered a problem: touch-sc

TOLL is available now! An action-thriller novel — book 2 in the KESTREL series. ★★★★★ — Amazon There’s been a lot of confusion about how the iPad VGA Adapter works. I received mine today, and I thought I’d try to clear things up a little (and give you some code to play with, if you’re an iPad developer with a VGA adapter of your own). The first thing to understand is that the adapter does not mirr

TOLL is available now! An action-thriller novel — book 2 in the KESTREL series. ★★★★★ — Amazon I held a 6-hour workshop at NSConference in both the UK and USA recently, focusing on software design and user experience. Predictably, an extremely popular topic was the iPad, and how to approach the design of iPad applications. I gave a 90-minute presentation on the subject to start each workshop, and

TOLL is available now! An action-thriller novel — book 2 in the KESTREL series. ★★★★★ — Amazon This is an emergency guide to iPhone software development, i.e. a guide for competent developers who haven’t written code for the iPhone platform before, and just want to get started right now. If you’re inexperienced in application development, this isn’t for you; try a good book instead. If, however, y

TOLL is available now! An action-thriller novel — book 2 in the KESTREL series. ★★★★★ — Amazon MGTemplateEngine is a native Cocoa system for generating text output based on templates and data. It’s a close cousin of systems like Smarty, FreeMarker, Django’s template language, and so on. It’s ideal for Cocoa apps needing to generate text output using variable-substitution (with looping and/or condi

TOLL is available now! An action-thriller novel — book 2 in the KESTREL series. ★★★★★ — Amazon Update: If you’re looking for information on getting MGTwitterEngine working with xAuth, please read this tutorial! Ever wanted to integrate Twitter support into your Cocoa app? I know I did. Enter MGTwitterEngine, available as always from my Cocoa Source Code page. (Oh, and I’m “mattgemmell” on Twitter,

TOLL is available now! An action-thriller novel — book 2 in the KESTREL series. ★★★★★ — Amazon As Cocoa developers, whenever we get a major new release of Mac OS X, we have to spend time familiarising ourselves with the new APIs and facilities on offer. One of the main goals of this investigative process is to identify controls and funtionality which we previously had to implement ourselves, but w