Tech

I need to bookmark this. And so should you.

There's this framework called Search Kit, which despite being insanely powerful and useful for finding information, is something that almost no one has ever heard of.

Damn, this is pretty nice. Add particle effects to UIKit, just like in Cocos2D: create them with UIEffectDesigner, then add them to your project with UIEffectDesignerView. Works for both iOS and Mac. Still in beta, but I haven't found any glitches so far.

It's as easy as:

#import "UIEffectDesignerView.h"
...
UIEffectDesignerView* effectView = [UIEffectDesignerView effectWithFile:@"name_of_your_choice.ped"];
[self.view addSubview:effectView];

Whoa, indeed.

Whoa. Timepiece, a symbol font that displays numeric time with analog face: http://t.co/km3N0rbhyd (thx @fchimero).

Via @cameronmoll.

Markdown to rich text in Mail.app with 1 click by @tobiasoleary: ckyp.us/dR1j;
via Brett Terpstra.

This is going to be ==awesome==.

So what if you didn't pay attention in Geometry class--this is the real world, and in the real world, you have CGGeometry.h

Know it well, and you'll be on your way to discovering great new user interfaces in your apps. Do good enough of a job with that, and you may run into the greatest arithmetic problem of all: adding up all of the money you'll make with your awesome new app. Mathematical!

Here is the whole writeup; totally worth a read.

Today I found this great block-based UIAlertView, by Warren Moore. You can customize pretty much everything, except textAttributes for each button type separately. I forked it, modified it and also added a customizable, random angle for the (included) fall animation when dismissed.

Among other things, it supports landscape ==and== rotation from one orientation to another (some classes I stumbled upon 'till now supported both orientations as well, but not the rotation from one to another; silly, I know).

I issued a pull request, so until it gets approved (if it ever does) you can find the tweaked version on my GitHub.

This will be my go-to UIAlertView from now on.

Really nice utility class to modify the frame of an UIView. Semantically and without the multitude of CGRectMakes, using more readable stuff like:

[view.po_frameBuilder setWidth:100.0f height:40.0f]

You can find the class on his GitHub and read about it on his blog.

==Thanks, Sebastian!==

Making great progress on my current project, feels awesome! I will post some teaser screenshots soon enough.

Today was a fine day for science!

The most obvious thing is that I started writing this blog; that's an addition to what I had so far. What did change are my app pages: instead of having them under rolandleth.com/appname, I moved them to appname.rolandleth.com, so I can tweak them separately and build landing pages for them.

Welcome to my blog.

I thought it's about time I should start writing, but to be totally honest, that time has passed for quite some time now, so I should rephrase that to: ==I thought it's too damn long since I should have started writing==.

I will be writing mostly about iOS development. I'll post snippets, walkthroughs, tips and tricks, stuff that I struggled with and links to interesting stuff I find around the web.

The blog is running on Wordpress and it's written using Markdown, with the help of Mou and sometimes Poster.

==Thanks for visiting!==