Chris Boyd
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"Apps"
I never intended to spend my twenties in the same place. The plan, always, was to bounce around: Houston for three years, then New Orleans, then Portland, maybe NYC or San Francisco, and then settle down again in New Orleans and start a family. Life had other plans.
I’ve worked on software of all shapes and sizes. One of the world’s largest open source projects. Small, back-office projects that never saw the light of day. All points in between. There really has never been a dull moment, because I love challenges, and as a developer I’m always faced with challenges new and old every day.
Right now as I’m writing this I’m about to board JetBlue Flight 620 to JFK. Like several other people, I’m using the airport’s free WIFI access point to get onto the internet. Free, public WIFI is something that’s become somewhat of an expected luxury in the 10′s. I’m rarely in a place that isn’t near some sort of open WIFI network.
Nike+ and Spotify users rejoice: You can definitely use Spotify as your music player while doing a Nike+ run. I discovered this last night out of necessity, I was trying to run to a playlist I’d created on Spotify earlier in the day, but every time I started the run, Nike+ would take over and get all commandeering about the music.
With the new iOS Data Storage Guidelines that arrived with iCloud and iOS 5, it’s muy importante to pay attention to where you place any preloaded data and file caches. The Documents directory is now only for data that’s been initialized by the user, an important distinction.
The Pew Research Center’s Journalism.org released an interesting survey today that centers around news consumption on tablet devices. Amongst the numerous findings, they report that 11% of US adults now own a tablet-based device. That’s pretty impressive for a device that didn’t even exist 2 years ago.
I went to the first annual Jenkins User Conference yesterday, and all the Jenkins talk inspired me to do a step-by-step guide as a follow-up to my original Jenkins post, which many of you requested. If you’re an iOS developer working with a team of people, especially a team of beta testers, you’re going to want to get into this. Quickly.
I’ve always had a pretty tenuous relationship with sleep. Despite trying various things over the years, it turns out that I’m just one of those 6-hours-a-night kind of people. Which actually works out pretty well because I don’t really have the time to be an 8-hours-a-night kind of person anyways.
If you’ve set up your application to handle tasks asynchronously using the NSOperationQueue approach, be wary of the maxConcurrentOperationCount property for your queues. I had been having first load performance issues with an app that has to download a good bit of data on first start.
Notificant is something I use all the time. I’m one of those people that has about 20 things going on in any given day, both at work and in my personal life, so I’ve found that in order to get anything done I need a reliable task list and a reliable reminder system.
