Category Archives: Tools
Markdown on MacOS
Readown is a markdown viewer for MacOS. I couldn’t get it to open .markdown files on my machine after downloading the binary, so I grabbed the source from github and rebuilt for Lion which seemed to solve the issue. I’m posting it up here thinking it may help someone else. Cheers!
Great New Developer Tool in Lion
via Matt Gemmell
Lion adds a new utility for simulating network types, called the Network Link Conditioner. Seems like a great tool for simulating rough network conditions in your apps.
To install this (it’s a preference pane) you’ll have to find it in a folder inside the utilities under applications. Simply double click to install!
Parsing Sucks
The developers of Hipmunk posted a recent blog article detailing their post-mortem thoughts on the creation of their iPhone client. It’s a good read top-to-bottom, but I thought the most interesting bit was regarding the performance and data transfer between the Hipmunk servers and the client. This quote I think sums it up aptly:
Parsing large amounts of JSON sucks.
I think that can hold true whether you’re talking about JSON or XML. In fact, I find that parsing a given XML feed into business objects eats up a sizable chunk of time on any project. Their solution was to send compiled plists rather than big chunks of JSON, which cut the import time down by more than an order of magnitude. Not too shabby.
Compiling a plist server side doesn’t seem to be as big of a chore as you’d think. In fact, there’s a github project that will do the server side compilation for you. We have a couple of end-to-end products developed here at Mindgrub that we’re going to look at implementing using compiled plists over the XML we’re using now.
10 iOS Libraries + 2
AppDevMag posted a list of 10 libraries to make iOS development easier. We’ve used Three20 and a few of the others here at Mindgrub, and wound up writing our own library similar to ASIHTTPRequest back in the iOS 2 days, though it was built around NSHTTPURLRequest rather than CFNetwork.
Two great libraries they left out however:
- ShareKit – Post to many social network sites out of the box. This library is light and fast, and easily extendable to add other services.
- XMLRPC in WordPress for iOS – Writing XML-RPC from scratch is a pain, but this library will get a lot of the boiler plate code out of the way. The app is open source.
Search the developer docs from the Chrome Omnibar
ClickOnTyler posted a couple of helpful Chrome extensions for searching apple’s documention directly from the Omnibar. Simply type “ios UIImage” or “mac NSApplication” to search the apple docs. Very Handy!
