Researching front end tools, part 3: Angular & Webpack vs Browserify
Since early 2014 I’ve been working on a pretty big and complex Angular app called Sling and sadly it’s not using any module system and it’s still using ES5 only. It uses Gulp to bundle and minify all the JavaScript, compile and minify our Less files,...
Researching front end tools, part 2: Deku, page.js and cssnext
Two weeks ago I started my journey into researching front end tools, with the idea to find my ultimate stack of build tools, JavaScript frameworks and/or libraries, CSS processors, a code style to follow and code linter to enforce it, and finally...
Researching front end tools, part 1: Ampersand.js, React, Webpack, PostCSS and ESLint
Since early 2014 I’ve been building a fairly large and complex JavaScript app in AngularJS, using Less as the CSS pre-processor and Gulp as the build system. I haven’t used ES6 or modules so far, via Browserify or otherwise. While it works and...
The nightmare of downloading OS X Mavericks
I’ve been running OS X Mavericks on both my home and work laptops since beta 3 or so. And when Apple released it to the public of course I wanted to upgrade both my computers as soon as possible. Sadly you can’t simply upgrade from GM, you have to...
Review roundup: email clients for OS X
Email is a huge part of my my life and I need a client that accommodates my ways and habits. It needs to be fast and user friendly. It needs to support multiple email accounts. And it needs to offer proper Google Mail support: archiving email by...
Searching for a solution to back up all my pictures to the cloud
I have well over 35 GB of pictures, and after almost losing my hard drive (it started to behave very strangely but I was able to salvage all the pictures) I realised that I need to back them up in the cloud. I do usually share my best ones on...
Review roundup: iOS debug tools and inspectors
All of a sudden it seems there’s a big effort to create debugging tools for iOS developers. Some are free, they all have different features… Time for a comparison. PonyDebugger “Remote network and data debugging for your native iOS app using Chrome...
Getting started with programming
At least twice per year someone will ask me how he or she can get started with programming. With the economy down jobs are hard to find, but there’s always a need for developers, at least here in Iceland - so it’s no wonder that more people are...
iOS development: three years later
In April 2010 I started to work on my very first iPhone app. A new language, a new IDE, a completely new way of thinking about development (threads! memory! crashes!), it was very exciting. In these three years quite a lot has happened to us iOS...
JobControl is six years old
I absolutely love open source software. I use all kinds of third party libraries for iOS for example (installed via the open source CocoaPods project of course), which makes my life as a developer a whole lot easier. And in return I open source some...
Apple's worst iOS framework: MediaPlayer
When I started to work on Last.fm’s Scrobbler for iOS, I though it would be quite an easy app to create. After all, it’s basically a couple of lists of artists, albums and tracks, and all actual music playback will be done using the MediaPlayer...
The software I used in 2012
As a software developer, I use a lot of software and tools to help me in my job. In this post I’d like to list some of my most used software of the last year. Hopefully there are some gems that can help you as well! Xcode As an iOS developer, this...
A new (static) website
More than a year ago I was playing around with static site generators because I wanted to simplify my code and ultimately get rid of my server. My reasons back then were performance, version control and integration with GitHub. I tried a few...
Looking back at 2012
On January 2 I moved to Iceland with two suitcases and a job contract. My new title: iOS developer at Gangverk, a small company creating iPhone- and Android apps for CBS in the United States. This was the beginning of an amazing year for me, both...
MPVolumeView (Airplay button) on an UIBarButtonItem
In an app I’m currently building, the client wants an Airplay button in the navigation bar, with a nice background like so: After trying some things, the solution seems to be to loop over the subviews. It feels a bit hacky, but works perfectly:...
Why is there no perfect browser?
I’ve used Firefox for a long, long time, back when I still used Windows pc’s, until the summer 2007. Chrome didn’t exist yet, Internet Explorer sucked and Safari was still Mac-only. Since then, I’ve switched browsers many times: from Firefox to...
Playing around with static site generators
Even though I’m quite happy with this website and its code, I want to rebuild it using a static site generator: you write your posts and pages with Markdown, write a couple of page html templates, and simply by pushing a new file to Git, your new...
Designing my very own ideal programming language
In 2009 I made the switch to Python, after having worked exclusively with PHP and Javascript for almost a decade. I really like the language, much more than I ever liked PHP. Of course it’s not perfect (see one of my first posts called Things I hate...
Review roundup: the search for the perfect Python IDE (for Django)
When I first started working with Python in September 2009, I needed a good IDE. I quickly settled for Netbeans and I’ve been using it ever since, even though there are some things that really irritate me. But at least it works, and fits well in my...
My wishes for iOS 5
In June 2010 Apple finally added multitasking to the iPhone (the iPad had to wait ’til November to get iOS version 4) and with this resolved one of my biggest complaints about the operating system. And while I really enjoy iOS on the iPhone and the...