As much as I basically like Xcode, let’s just say it’s not without its infuriating quirks. Among these quirks are a number of subtle bugs that seriously degrade its usability, but that only seem to appear after using it for several hours or days. Your text editors stop showing your changes, the spinning pizza of [...]

First of all, if you’re dealing with any sensitive information on behalf of the user, you’re ethically responsible for storing that information securely. Mac OS X’s deeply integrated Keychain Services leaves you with no excuse for saving passwords, credit card numbers, or other sensitive information in plain-text format on the user’s disk. Access to items [...]

I’ve been working on iTunes integration for FlexTime. My model for this feature is roughly approximated by GarageBand’s “Send To iTunes” feature, which packages up the current song into an M4A format, sends it off to iTunes, starts playing it, and makes sure the playlist into which it was added becomes visible in the iTunes [...]

Resolution independence is the notion that all graphics on a computer display should be zoomable to an arbitrary multiplier without losing quality. If you know even the slightest thing about computer graphics, you’ll understand that in a resolution independent world, bitmaps are out and vector graphics are in. Vector graphics can scale gracefully to an [...]