Thinking Out Loud

Attach to Process by PID or Name...

Tue, May 02, 2017

Some how Xcode’s “Attach to Process by PID or Name..” came up recently in conversation and several of my developer friends had never heard about it. I’d like to quickly walk through my favorite use case, auto attaching to a process when it launches.

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Debugging with Private API

Wed, Nov 16, 2016

UIKit has a built in physics engine called UIKit Dynamics. It’s how Apple has implemented quite a few of the animations in iOS. It’s pretty powerful but it can also be a pain in the ass to debug. According to Session 229 from WWDC 2015, the supported way for debugging is to use private API on UIDynamicAnimator. There are some hacks for gaining access to private API inside of Objective-C — things like using NSInvocation — but they’re not supported in Swift. That’s ok though, because Apple actually wants us to use lldb to access this private API.

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Starbucks Tech Talk

Thu, Oct 27, 2016

I was recently asked to speak at Starbucks for an internal thing they call Tech Talks. It was a great crowd and lots of fun. I gave a talk about adding Swift into an existing Objective-C application and framework. This post is mostly to share my slides and code.

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Followup – Custom Presentation Controllers and Adaptability

Mon, Aug 10, 2015

As the title suggests, this is a followup to my previous post about Custom Presentation Controllers and Adaptability. In that post I argued that the current API for custom presentation controllers is a little lacking when it comes to switching between custom and system provided presentations during the life of a single presentation. A friend of mine proposed a workaround that I’d like to explore. Feel free to grab the code and follow along: CustomAdaptablePresentation

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Custom Presentation Controllers and Adaptability

Tue, Aug 04, 2015

Last year, with iOS 8, Apple gave us the ability to customize view controller presentations. Not only can you create a custom transition for a presentation, you can now add behavior to deal with adaptability. Recently I hit a wall with using a custom UIPresentationController.

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UIBarButtonItem and Custom Views

Tue, Apr 28, 2015

First things first. UIBarButtonItems are not views. They’re more akin to model level objects. You create them and set up styling on them, but the framework converts their properties into actual UIView subclasses. And this is were the majority of problems that I have with UIBarButtonItem come from.

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