iOS & macOS development

Yesterday, I tweeted a classical design issue on who should own a view controller.

Mugunth Kumar ()@mugunthkumar
The controller that presents a modal controller should dismiss it. Don't do [self dismissModalViewControllerAnimated:NO] in the child.

25 Feb 12 ReplyRetweetFavorite

Mugunth Kumar ()@mugunthkumar
Calling [self dismissModalViewControllerAnimated:NO] on child is like committing seppuku. A child shouldn't kill itself.
25 Feb 12 ReplyRetweetFavorite

The negative replies I received to the tweet were phenomenal that I had to write this post explaining the “why” behind the tweet.

Apple committed a new patch to the llvm project adding support for new Objective-C literal syntax for NSArray, NSDictionary and NSNumber. These have previously been documented in the Mountain Lion Xcode release notes but that was still under NDA. Now that these features have been committed to llvm I guess we’re allowed to speak about it.

OpenEars is an shared-source iOS framework for implementing round-trip English language speech recognition and text-to-speech on the iPhone and iPad, which uses the CMU Pocketsphinx, CMU Flite, and CMUCLMTK libraries.

Highly-accurate large-vocabulary recognition (that is, trying to recognize any word the user speaks out of many thousands of known words) is not yet a reality for local in-app processing on the iPhone given the hardware limitations of the platform; even Siri does its large-vocabulary recognition on the server side.

However, Pocketsphinx is capable of local recognition on the iPhone of vocabularies with hundreds of words depending on the environment and other factors, and performs very well with command-and-control language models.

How awesome would it be if a networking framework automatically takes care of caching responses for you?

How awesome would it be if a networking framework automatically remembers your operations when your client is offline?

You favorite a tweet or mark a feed as read when you are offline and the Networking Framework performs all these operations when the device comes back online, all with no extra coding effort from you.

Introducing MKNetworkKit.

RestKit is an Objective-C framework for iOS that aims to make interacting with RESTful web services simple, fast and fun. It combines a clean, simple HTTP request/response API with a powerful object mapping system that reduces the amount of code you need to write to get stuff done.