Dev juice Articles on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog

DevJuice: Spark Inspector offers real time iOS interface inpection

by Erica Sadun (May 18th, 2013)

Spark Inspector (US$39.99 single-license) offers an exciting new development tool. Targeting devs looking to refine their user interfaces, it enables you to interactively tweak view properties like frames and layers. The app centers around an Interface Builder-like experience, with ...

DevJuice: Apple's ObjC-JavaScript Bridge

by Erica Sadun (May 17th, 2013)

In a new post at his Steamclock Software blog, Nigel Brooke writes how Apple has added new Objective-C-to-Javascript bridging to WebKit: "This new API supports straightforward embedding of the JavaScriptCore interpreter into native Objective-C projects, including reading and writing variables ...

DevJuice: iTC Daily Reports delivered to your inbox

by Erica Sadun (Dec 10th, 2012)

Wevito's Daily Reports, which offers a 30-day free trial followed by a US$4.99 one-time payment for lifetime service, scrapes iTunes on your behalf and sends daily email updates to you. To make this work, you entrust Wevito with iTunes Connect credentials. Admittedly, you do not have to pass ...

DevJuice: placekitten and other handy placeholder sites

by Erica Sadun (Jul 27th, 2012)

What do you give to the dev who has everything? How about placeholder kittens, compete with their own API? placekitten.com provides on-demand placeholder art at the resolution you specify. For example, you could ask for a 625x225 image by submitting a request ...

Devjuice: Installing command line tools (or not)

by Erica Sadun (Jul 12th, 2012)

Oliver Drobnik over at Cocoanetics has posted another really great how-to write-up, this time about Xcode and command-line tools. He shows you how to access apps from inside the Xcode bundle by using xcrun, and how to set your default Xcode install (via xcode-select). That's especially useful in ...

DevJuice: Should I develop cross platform?

by Erica Sadun (May 8th, 2012)

App Store. Android. Amazon. If you're a developer, there are lots of possible venues competing for your attention. So which one is worth your time and energy? I turned to Avatron Founder and CEO Dave Howell for the answer. Avatron makes Air Display, a popular app that allows you to use a mobile ...

DevJuice: ShipIt! provides customizable image resizing for multiresolution development

by Erica Sadun (Feb 21st, 2012)

ShipIt!, currently on sale for $0.99 at the Mac App Store, offers a simple utility for resizing multiresolution images. Its suite of standardized image formats (such as 512x512 iTunes artwork, 57x57 iPhone icons, and 72x72 iPad ones) ensure that you can create consistent elements from your core ...

Dev Juice: The Art of Readable Code

by Erica Sadun (Nov 18th, 2011)

"The Art of Readable Code" by Dustin Boswell and Trevor Foucher is a fairly short work at under 200 pages, but it addresses a topic near and dear to many developers' hearts. Littered with cartoons and code samples, it's meant to convey the basic philosophy of creating well-structured code that ...

Dev Juice: When should you use out-of-app Settings?

by Erica Sadun (Nov 7th, 2011)

Dear Dev Juice, I've heard all the lectures and I understand that the discoverability of third party prefs in the Settings app is near zero. I also get that it's now best practice that developers should put preferences inside applications with custom screens. I'm writing to ask this: what use ...

DevJuice: HockeyApp improves crash reports, beta testing

by Erica Sadun (Oct 10th, 2011)

You may be familiar with the well-respected TestFlight beta distribution service. Now, HockeyApp has arrived on the scene to give TestFlight a little competition. TUAW sat down with its developer to discover what the service might mean to you. Like TestFlight, HockeyApp offers a core beta ...

Dev Juice: Automatic Reference Counting

by Erica Sadun (Sep 22nd, 2011)

Dear Dev Juice, I'm so confused. Is ARC Automatic Reference Counting or Automated Reference Counting? And is it Manual Retain and Release or Manual Reference Counting? Help a guy out. Paul W. Dear Paul, Let's separate those two questions because there's a cut-and-dried answer for the ...

Dev Juice: Help find me a standalone property editor

by Erica Sadun (Aug 31st, 2011)

"Dear Dev Juice, With Lion and new xCode 4, Property List Editor is missing. Opening xCode to just be able to edit a plist file is not what I want. So my question is how do you edit your plist files ? Do you know an alternative to xCode 4? Thanks. Thierry" Dear Thierry, If you ...

Dev Juice: Help me use less hard drive space for Xcode

by Erica Sadun (Jul 22nd, 2011)

Dear Dev Juice, I have a small SSD drive on my iMac. Got some tips on how to offload Xcode to my USB drive instead? Jaames C. Dear Jaames, You can install some but not all of Xcode to a secondary drive. You'll still end up using about half a gigabyte, but that's a sight better than the ...

Dev Juice: Help me recover my beta partition

by Erica Sadun (Jul 18th, 2011)

Dear Dev Juice, I was in the Lion beta program. Now that 10.7 is about to release I want to reclaim the small partition I added to my laptop that I was using to test it. How do I do this? Shawn Dear Shawn, Disk Utility (/Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility) makes it easy to recover ...

Dev Juice: Help me set up a multiperson dev team

by Erica Sadun (Jul 8th, 2011)

Dear Dev Juice, We have a 3 man dev team with the iOS developer program (as a small company plan) and we are getting ready to move up to Xcode 4 once Lion is out to the public and the have a stable sdk. What is the best way to set all of our systems so we can each build for adhoc distribution ...