By using the Quick Look Framework — If you need in your app to present a document like a PDF, a bunch of images, or even a Microsoft Office or iWork document, you can use the Quick Look Framework that ships with iOS. You start by importing the QuickLook framework into your project file. You then create…

Miners Run iOS Endurance Game — I’ve been an iOS developer for a good few years now, and I have never managed to release anything under my own name… until now. It gives me great pleasure to introduce to you Morris: Miners Run has been a work in progress since February 2014. I used the new SpriteKit framework that Apple released with iOS7; I greatly enjoyed working with this framework — despite finding the inevitable bugs you find along the way when you work with anything that new and complex.

Using Xcode — Pull to Refresh is a common idiom on iOS—originally made popular by the folks at Twitter. This approach to refreshing a view has become so ubiquitous Xcode now enables you to add this feature to your views in just a few simple steps. …

With AutoLayout — A UITextView does not automatically resize in a UIView when you use AutoLayout alone; code is required—specifically, code similar to this: CGSize size = self.textView.contentSize; self.textViewHeightConstraint.constant = size.height; For this approach to work it is important that you place these lines in the right place—in the viewDidAppear method—and that you…

Make all visual distinctions as subtle as possible, but still clear and effective. Edward R. Tufte—Visual Explanations p.73 Tufte describes this principal as the ‘Occam’s razor’ of information design. You take a visual element, such as a border on a image or a background for a table cell, then ask yourself: is the difference here noticeable, and no more. Use less to show more. When creating designs, screens, web pages, information graphics, the idea is to use just noticeable differences.

Developing Node Modules — Working with Node.js typically means you also work with npm. A lot. If you work with node and you’re not using npm—a lot—then you’re probably missing a trick or two. My first tip on npm is linking. What is linking and why should I care? Linking provides a way for…

Node.js by example — As part of my book ideas I thought about the sample apps I would need to write to create this book. I came up with about 10 different ideas, some of which built on top of one another, and some that didn’t. Having thought about this some more I’ve come…

A tale of two book ideas — I want to write a book. A book about Node.js. I have a few ideas and today I formalised a couple of those ideas into two proposals. …

Opening files on the Raspberry Pi in TextMate — I love working with text on my Mac; I tend to write large documents in iA Writer and code with TextMate 2 or Xcode, which for me, is a very pleasing experience all round—having recently bought a Raspberry Pi I wanted to extend the awesome into that world too. …