As iOS developer, here’s my humble list of what I hope to see today:

Fix UICollectionView’s, or everyone will be using PSTCollectionView (which is great by the way).

Fix iCloud. Because it just doesn’t work. A back-end as a service like Parse which worked natively with Core Data would be great.

Open Siri to third party developers to make it useful.

Last but not least, give me a damn Macbook Air Retina! It will not happen, I already know.

I recently interviewed a young man. I asked him where he wants to be in four years. “Running my own company,” he said without hesitation. I asked why. “Because entrepreneurship is in my blood,” he replied. There was no mention of what his hypothetical company would do, what problem it would solve for people. His goal was business for the sake of business.

Alex Payne on Letter To A Young Programmer Considering A Startup

That’s why I don’t bear startups and most startuppers.
Oh god, I can’t belive I said that word.

The new version (> 6.0) of the Facebook app is probably one of the best non-Apple’s app in the store nowadays.
Every day, I look forward to the next update to see what they’ve added and to understand how they’ve done it.

In one of the latest updates, the hacker @chpwn added this awesome feature:

@aaronash you should try the swipe back gesture I did for the latest Facebook update

— Grant Paul (chpwn) (@chpwn) 13 maggio 2013

Basically a kind of hack of UINavigationController to slide to the previous view controller in the navigation stack.

And the response was quite good:

Dynamic swipe back behaviour in UINavigationControllers (like Flurry and the new Facebook app update) need to be a thing. They're awesome.

— Adam Bell (@b3ll) 14 maggio 2013

So, why shouldn’t I try to create something similar for my own apps?

Taking advantage of few spare hours in a sunny Sunday of May, here you are:

Go and get it from GitHub :)

When it comes to nerdy stuff, here I am.

In our office at The App Business, we have finally found a purpose for our old iPad 1: Status Board. We are displaying the status of builds on our Jenkins machine on our 40” TV.

But we want more. We want to be able to see the latest BitBucket’s issues of our all repositories.

So I wrote a simple ruby script which creates an html table of issues ordered by creation date and saves it on Dropbox.
You can find it on GitHub.

You have to setup the config inside the file issues.rb

config = {
  username: 'you',
  password: 'your_password',
  repo_owner: 'your_company_or_you',
  dropbox_folder: '/Users/marcosero/Dropbox/sync'
}

and then create a timed launcher for it. Something like this

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
    <key>Label</key>
    <string>com.marcosero.status_board_issues</string>
    <key>ProgramArguments</key>
    <array>
        <string>ruby path/to/issues.rb</string>
    </array>
    <key>StartInterval</key>
    <integer>300</integer>
</dict>
</plist>

and then copy it and start it:

$ cp com.marcosero.status_board_issues.plist ~/Library/LaunchAgents
$ launchctl load -w ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.marcosero.status_board_issues.plist

I’m working on a new iPhone app (a personal one). it happened that, in a eventful night, I created an iOS component to organize view controllers in a gesture-based 2D matrix.

So, I decided to share it on GitHub.