A luxury that you seldom have in the world of software development is the luxury of starting over. I am not talking about throwing away everything and start from scratch. But just taking what you have, and all the experiences learned. Apply some major refactoring to make what works really shine, and without care of [...]

Enterprise applications and mobile applications have quite different requirements. Starting an enterprise application is just something you do once before it continue running for months or years. On the other side of the spectrum most mobile applications seldom runs for more than minutes, run by a bored users standing in line or riding the bus. [...]

The Cocoa and Cocoa Touch frameworks has a really nice function for acquiring a localized string NSLocalizedString(). Just pass in a key and you are done, for strings that are known at least. Sometimes you are getting unknown strings from a data source not under your control, strings representing just a fraction of the text [...]

First impressions last, and the very first impression your users have of your iPhone application is the start up. First step is to have a nice Default.png, but not many words spilled on that one, it is well covered in Apple’s documentation.
Creating a perfect Default.png is impossible, especially if you have different setup of navigation [...]

The megahertz race is over, and instead we get more execution cores. This means that we as developers must make our applications parallel, in order to take advantage of the new performance. The easiest way to be parallel is to execute tasks in new threads, something that is useful also for lengthy but not resource [...]

Regular expressions is a powerful tool for solving many problems related to text. It can be misused as any good tool, but there are moments when they are the best solution for a given problem. At those moments the lack of regular expressions for Cocoa on Mac OS X and Cocoa Touch on iPhone OS [...]

NSArray and NSMutableArray have methods for sorting arrays, NSArray returns new sorted arrays and NSMutableArray can be sorted in place. The sort methods comes in three flavours; using a function, using a selector, or using an array of NSSortDescriptor objects.
NSArray admits to sorts being a slow operation, and adds a method pair for comultive sorts [...]

Many Java developers are looking at new dynamic languages, such as Groovy and JRuby, mostly because of the freedom and rapid development that a dynamic language allows. Some of my colleagues are also looking at Cocoa and feel daunted at the sight of Objective-C.
Here I will use a small example that is easy and [...]

The new release of iPhone OS 3.0 adds some nice API:s for managing a contextual toolbar. This is well needed as toolbars in the current iteration of iPhone OS is not only poorly documented, it is also quite hard to do right. So I will go over how to do toolbars the right way, for [...]

Nishant wrote a good piece on why Apple continue to outdo it’s rivals, he used a variant of a quote by Canadian hockey player Wayne Gretzky to make his point:
A good hockey player plays where the puck is. A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be.
This is true as it stands, [...]

It is no secret that the published interfaces for MIDP classes in any JavaME Platform is only a subset of what in reality is there. Most of the native calls needed to interact with the underlying native platform, and other helper methods, are hidden from us. Mostly for good, and sometimes for bad…
The Anecdotal History
We [...]

UITabBarController is generally used as is, no subclassing required. It creates a UITabBar and manages a list of UIViewControllers, keeping track of the tab in focus, UI creation and everything nice. UITabBarController has a delegate, the UITabBarControllerDelegate protocol. Unfortunately this is not a superset of the UITabBarDelegate protocol, and UITabBarController already implements the UITabBarDelegate protocol [...]