This is the second video in the series of videos that I’m preparing, demonstrating to iOS developers how they can take advantage of logging facilities provided in the iOS SDK to be able to find defects and issues in their apps just by looking at the logs, without the need to use a debugger at all.
In this video, I will teach you two very handy tricks that you can use with NSLog method in Objective-C…
Ever wanted to learn to save hours of your and your teammates’ time by creating software that doesn’t crash, has logs and lets you find its defects easily? Ever got sick and tired of using a debugger in order to find defects in your code? Well, I’ve decided to create a series of videos explaining how you can avoid having to debug your application simply by…logging information in your app! This video is the first video in the series. In this video, you will learn how to use NSLog in iOS SDK in order to log information to the console.
Here is the video, enjoy!
I made a video here to teach iOS developers how to write multitasking aware apps. I was on O’Reilly’s website and all of a sudden realized that my article has appeared on top of the main page… Isn’t that awesome? I took a screen shot.
My Article + Video appearing on O'Reilly's main page on top
So apple announced they have made new MacBook Pros. Having a MBP myself, I was keen to see what the specifications were and how Apple improved this machine which already was a beast. So here is the deal:
First thing you will notice is that all CPUs are upgraded to Intel Core i5 and Core i7. That’s great but what is even better is that they are not just normal Core i5 and i7. They are, on 15 and 17″ MacBook Pros, indeed, Quad Core i5 and i7 CPUs. That’s a huge processing power for a laptop.
The next thing you’ll notice is that the 13″ MacBook Pro is also upgraded to take advantage of Intel Core i5 and i7 but the CPU on 13″ models is dual core rather than a quad core on 15 and 17″ models. It’s a great processor nonetheless!
The other thing that you’ll notice is the graphics adapter on the 15 and the 17″ models which is now switched to use AMD chipsets. The 15″ comes with these variety of graphic chipsets:
AMD Radeon HD 6490M with 256MB GDDR5
AMD Radeon HD 6750M with 1GB GDDR5
The battery life, not much change there but considering the huge upgrade in the CPU, it is pretty impressive the same battery life is provided to customers since you’d be expecting the CPU to consume more power (although that’s not always the relation between increase in processing power and consumption of batter).
All in all, these new MacBook Pros seems amazing. Are you going to order one? Have you ordered one already? B)
Only for developers though! It’s a developer preview version. Here is what Apple said today:
Apple today released a developer preview of Mac OS X Lion, which takes some of the best ideas from iPad and brings them back to the Mac for the eighth major release of the world’s most advanced operating system. Lion features Mission Control, an innovative new view of everything running on your Mac; Launchpad, a new home for all your Mac apps; full-screen apps that use the entire Mac display; and new Multi-Touch gestures. Lion also includes the Mac App Store, the best place to discover, install, and automatically update Mac apps. The Lion preview is available to Mac Developer Program members through the Mac App Store today, and the final version of Lion will ship to customers this summer.
Have you tried it? Do you like it? What do you think about the king?
Sending Emoji smileys in an SMS
Apple has a little secret… Emojis… Emoji is Japanese for “Electronic Emoticons”. There are currently more than 100 smileys and emoticons that you can enable on your iOS device, be it iPhone, iPad or iPod. But, there is a little trick involved. Watch this video to be able to send these awesome emoticons and smileys in your text messages and elsewhere in iOS:
You’ve known for a long time that iOS supports multitasking but you’ve never had a chance to really learn how to implement it in your app. Well, in this video, I will teach you how to do that. It’s simple and straight to the point. Make sure you leave a comment and if you have any questions, let me know. I’ll do my best answering them 🙂
You want to add a UIActivityIndicator in iOS SDK on top of a navigation bar button and you have searched everywhere for a solution. Wherever you went, they said “initialize your UIBarButtonItem with a custom view”. But you know what? That doesn’t quite do the trick.
What you want is this:
UIActivityIndicator on a UIBarButtonItem
And they keep showing you a solution that does this:
UIBarButtonItem initialized with a custom view of type UIActivityIndicator
To explain how you should do it the right way (first image), have a look at my screencast here. Make sure to leave a comment!
There is this kind-of-new-feature that Apple introduced in Safari which is called “Reader Mode”. What Reader Mode does is simply amazing.
For instance, let’s say you go to this link right here. You can see some text there which is surrounded with some other text and maybe a picture here and there. The bottom line is, you went to that page to see the main article and yet your eyes are seeing other things as well. Reader Mode to the rescue. If you open Safari and go to the same link, and then from View menu in Safari, select Show Reader, you will see a newspaper-line report of the main text in that page. I’ve included a screen shot that you can have a look at. It’s simply amazing!
You can learn more about Safari by going to this link. Do you use Safari? What do you and don’t you like about it?
Safari Reader Mode
What am I up to these days? I’ve been working on the outline of a new book that I will be working on this year. It is really exciting and I can’t wait to start writing new material for it. I really enjoy writing books. In fact, I learn from writing books more than I learn from reading them sometimes. And that’s just sometimes, I cannot say it always happens because of various reasons. For instance, I learn from Robert Kiyosaki about finances and financial IQ and there is no way at the moment I can write material about finances as wisely as Robert has written. However, if my domain of knowledge covers finances, then writing a book about finances will definitely teach me more about the subject than reading one. And the sole reason for that is: once you start writing a book, you have to know what you are talking about and if you want to know what you are talking about, you have to read other books and resources! So it is a big push. A good reason to learn.
What are some of the books you have been reading recently?
Vandad NP 