Sam Soffes

For the seasoned Cocoa developer, this is a piece of cake. For newer developers, this can be a real pain, especially if you don't know what you're looking for. I get this question a decent amount, so I figured I'd put a quick guide together.

You can't put just any object in a plist. This mainly gets people when they want to put something into NSUserDefaults and get an error (because NSUserDefaults archives to a plist under the hood).

Plists only support the core types: NSString, NSNumber, NSDate, NSData, NSArray, NSDictionary (and their CF buddies thanks to the toll-free bridge). The key here is NSData. You can convert any object to NSData with the NSCoding protocol.

Continue reading →

Update: You can see the latest benchmarks at https://github.com/soffes/json-benchmarks. The results change quite a bit, so I'd recommend just running the code and seeing who wins.

I wrote a post awhile ago about JSON benchmarks. I was telling a friend he should use JSON Framework based on my old benchmark post. He asked if I had run them again recently, so I figured I'd run them again.

I updated my test app and added a new library called YAJL based on a C library. My results were very similar to before. This time I tested it on an iPad and iPod Touch.

Continue reading →

Here are two talks from RailsConf 2010. You can see all of the keynotes on YouTube. I haven't ever gone to a RailsConf, but I hope to sometime.

Even if you aren't a developer, these videos are totally worth your time.

This is a short 26 minute talk by Yehuda Katz (@wycats) on development in general. This is so inspiring. He talks about doing the impossible and just getting stuff done. Really worth your time.

Continue reading →

I arrived in San Francisco a couple of hours ago. This week is going to be awesome. I am really looking forward to WWDC 2010!

I've been telling a few people what I think Jobs is going to announce tomorrow at the keynote. I figured it would be good to post it so I can brag about how right I was. (Just joking. I'm not really that arrogant.)

There will be a new iPhone. All of the crazy rumors, phones left in bars, and cops raiding apartments aside, historically Apple has always announced a new one every year since it was released at WWDC.

Continue reading →

I've found myself setting up lots of servers over at RackSpace Cloud lately. It seemed look a good idea to automate everything instead of leaving it up to myself to remember everything you have to do each time.

I wrote this little shell script to make life easier. It installs everything I need to run a Ruby on Rails app in a matter of minutes. It's designed to work with Cent OS 5.4+. Here's the script's main tasks:

• Install Git 1.7.1.1
• Install Ruby 1.8.7p299
• Install RubyGems 1.3.7
• Install Passenger 2.2.15
• Install Nginx 0.8.45 (with Passenger and SSL modules)
• Install Postgres 8.4.4
• Initialize Postgres
• Install ImageMagick 6.6.3-0
• Install Bundler (latest)
• Open port 80 in iptables
• Open port 443 in iptables
• Start Nginx
• Start Postgres

Continue reading →