Screencast: Reuse Code Across iPhone Applications with a Static Library and Git
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A few of my friends have recently asked me how to share code between their applications. Here's a screencast walking you through how I solve this problem. It works really well for me. I hope this is useful to you.
You can get my terminal shortcuts from my dot files repo on GitHub. You can also find the test app and test library on GitHub.
The git submodule documentation might also be useful to you if you're new to working with submodules. If that's a little hard to understand (I know it is for me), just try googling it. There's a lot of good resources on submodules.
App Store Approval Process
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So Joel Comm (funny story, he offered me a job awhile back, anyway) who most notably made iFart released a video (watch below) today begging Steve Jobs to let his new app into the App Store.
Like the other apps from his company, the don't do much besides play an entertaining sound. Apple rejected the app because it "contains minimal user functionality". He goes on to show many other apps that also just play a sound.
Here's my take on the whole thing. If Joel or anyone else wants to release a bunch of fun little sound, fine. Personally, I think they are dumb and wouldn't pay for one, but a lot of people have enjoyed iFart and other similar apps, so more power to them. (By the way Joel's company also makes other kinds of apps like this, this, and this. Cool stuff.) My big issue with all of this is the same as Joel's: consistency.
Customize UIKit with Method Swizzling
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Update 03/03/12: You should really use UIAppearance since this no longer works in iOS 5.0.
Have you ever wanted to override some functionality in UIKit that was in a hard to reach place? A lot of applications on the App Store have custom UINavigationBar's. I really wanted to do this one of my company's upcoming apps.
I Released an iPhone Push Notification Gem
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I forked a Rails plugin for sending push notifications with Rails awhile back for a client project. I've had a few people fork and add cool little fixes.
I've been wanting to play with GemCutter for awhile now. How hard could it be to release a Rails plugin as a gem, right? I sat down and rewatched a Railscast on how to build a gems with Jeweler and push it to GemCutter. It turns out, that was the easy part. GemCutter and Jeweler made it so easy to publish my plugin as gem.
So I know this is very backwards, but after it was on GemCutter I tested it my new gem. (Yes, many smacks on the hand for not writing test. I'm still learning all of that.) It turns out, that it was completely broken. I started to try and fix things, but ended up doing a complete rewrite.
Easy Deployment with Heroku
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I put together a quick screencast that shows the power of Heroku and how easy it is to deploy your app in literally seconds. I've started moving all of my little sites there. My company is even going to try a few of our new apps on there to see how we like it for bigger things.
Heroku is worth checking out even if you're happy with your current host. Their architecture is really impressive and the add-ons are really cool.
At first my app gave me an error saying it couldn't load gems. I thought I needed to unpack my gems, but Heroku replied to me on Twitter and provided a really good alternative to unpacking!