Completely unrelated to the recent brouhaha about Martin’s Potato Rolls, I had reason to try to recreate these amazing burger and hot dog buns for myself. You couldn’t find them easily here in San Francisco even before people starting calling for a boycott. There are two keys to this recipe: potato flakes and homemade dough … Continue reading Copycat Martin’s Potato Rolls →

On Serious Eats, Stella Parks (aka “Bravetart”) has published a homemade bagel recipe that uses instant yeast. Like everyone else during the pandemic, I’ve been cultivating a sourdough starter, and bagels seemed like a fantastic first application for it. I dug through the comments and found a link to a starter-adapted recipe on the Wayback … Continue reading Sourdough Bravetart Bagels →

Yesterday I wrote some code to hide the Trash location in our document picker when it’s empty. Today, I got a bug report that attempting to add or remove a cloud storage location in the document picker would now crash with an exception thrown by UITableView. These didn’t sound all that related other than timing and … Continue reading A Cascade of Table View Bugs →

iOS 8 brings a new and welcome class to UIKit: UIPresentationController, which reifies the presentation of view controllers in a configurable object whose lifetime can also be used to more cleanly manage auxiliary UI elements associated with that presentation. Conceptually, popovers are a form of presentation, so they are now managed via a subclass of UIPresentationController, logically … Continue reading UIPresentationController is (currently) a deficient API →

The new -[UIViewController targetViewControllerForAction:sender:] method (and its related methods, -showViewController:sender: and -showDetailViewController:sender:) in iOS 8 takes a clever responder chain-based approach to showing view controllers in a size-class-adaptable way. Basically, all UIViewController instances respond to -showViewController:sender: and -showDetailViewController:sender:, but their implementations use -targetViewControllerForAction:sender: to find the appropriate view controller to actually do the showing. In the case of -showViewController:sender:, this is likely an enclosing UINavigationController, and in the case … Continue reading -targetViewControllerForAction:sender: is smarter than it seems →

(I recently posted this thread to Apple’s objc-language mailing list. I welcome feedback there or here.) A recent Twitter conversation spurred me to think about how we use super in Objective-C. I have two main problems with the current functionality of super: It can only be used to dispatch to the immediate superclass.It’s sometimes useful to skip the superclass’s implementation from within … Continue reading The Behavior of Super →

Recently my coworker Tom was having a hard time with converting a Mac NIB to Auto Layout. The NIB contained a split view; on the left was an instance of OACalendarView, and on the right was a scroll view. The holding priorities of the left and right panes were 251 and 250, respectively, and the … Continue reading An Auto Layout Adventure: NSCell, -intrinsicContentSize, and -constraintsAffectingLayoutForOrientation: →

Up until three months ago, my time at the Omni Group had been spent programming solely for the Mac—I hadn't written any iOS code professionally, and I'd only dabbled the slightest bit on the side. That all changed when iOS 7 was announced, and I've now spent a solid three months as an iOS developer. … Continue reading How to think about UIScrollView.contentInset →

On Thursday, January 10, I gave a talk at Seattle Xcoders about Auto Layout, explaining the benefits and workings of this new technology and sharing some tips learned from our adoption of auto layout. I've uploaded the slides from my talk. I'll upload the video once I've found a place to put it. Update: Thanks … Continue reading Auto Layout Slides and Video Available →