This past week, the co-op students at A Thinking Ape participated in an internal hackathon where they had two days to develop something to show the rest of the company. Among the games and tools that resulted, one project stood out to me: a hello world app. Yes, a hello world app. (For those not in the software development field, “hello world” is usually the first output that developers code when trying out a new platform or language.) It had a white background, black text that said “Hello World,” and a green button that was labeled, “I am a button.” It Continue Reading
Software Development
Debugging NSNotifications on iOS
For iOS developers, this is a really cool technique. Sometimes you want to see all the NSNotifications that get posted in your app, whether it is for debugging, or to see the timing of where listeners can be hooked in. Using breakpoints in Xcode will allow us to inspect the notifications. Follow this procedure to set it up: In Xcode, open the breakpoints panel on the left sidebar. Click the + icon at the bottom left of the panel. Select “Add Symbolic Breakpoint…“ Enter the following details: Symbol: -[NSNotificationCenterpostNotificationName:object:userInfo:] Click Add Action and enter the following details: Debugger Command: po Continue Reading
When frames are too many
I was digging around my backups and came across this mockup of a site my friend and I worked on ten years ago, but never published. This was when Microsoft FrontPage was still around, frames were OK, and <blink>, <marquee> and animated GIFs were the rage, and when the whole world used Internet Explorer. I guess it didn’t occur to us back then that nine frames were eight frames too many. Oh, have times changed 🙂 Today, HTML framesets are rarely used. Server-side scripting such as PHP is used to replicate common code across multiple pages. Client-side alternatives such as CSS Continue Reading
Using Mac’s Automator to Make Diffing Easier
Recently I’ve been needing an easy way to paste two versions of a text, and get the differences between the texts, specifically changes within a line (most diff programs only show which lines have changed). After some searching, DiffMerge came up as one of the best free diff programs that would work on the Mac. DiffMerge is great in many aspects, however, it lacked the interface to paste in text to diff right off the start. I set out using Mac’s Automator tool to create an application to prompt the user for two texts, create the temporary files, then pass it into DiffMerge. Continue Reading
MyBB: Reasons Against a Database Import Feature
A discussion on the reasons why MyBB does not have a database import feature, including security, focus, weight and reliability.