Author Archives: Josh Smith

Ruminations on Swift

Posted on June 3, 2014 by Josh Smith

It’s been awhile since I have found anything worth blogging about in the iOS development world. The first day of WWDC 2014 changed all that. Had Apple only announced their new programming language, Swift, that would have been enough to … Continue reading →

Posted in Swift | 13 Comments

Video streaming from an IP camera to an Android phone

Posted on January 25, 2014 by Josh Smith

I recently picked up an IP camera to play around with and build an app that displays the camera’s live video stream. I chose the D-Link DCS-942L camera because it supports streaming video to a UDP socket by leveraging the … Continue reading →

Posted in Android, Streaming Media | 40 Comments

Base64 encoding in iOS 7

Posted on November 20, 2013 by Josh Smith

Over the years Apple has slowly but surely filled in some pretty conspicuous gaps in their application platform for iOS developers. They didn’t even support working with JSON data until iOS 5 introduced NSJSONSerialization! Another small, but important, gap that … Continue reading →

Posted in iOS7 | 3 Comments

A custom Terminal command to show/hide hidden files in the Mavericks Finder

Posted on November 11, 2013 by Josh Smith

In my previous blog post I showed the Terminal commands that allow you to cause Finder to display hidden files and directories. By default Finder does not show a file or directory if its name begins with a period, such … Continue reading →

Posted in Tips and Tricks | 1 Comment

View hidden files and directories with Finder in OS X Mavericks

Posted on October 29, 2013 by Josh Smith

With the release of OS X Mavericks the old Terminal command that causes Finder to show hidden files and directories no longer works. If you want to see hidden files, such as a .gitignore file in your repository, open a … Continue reading →

Posted in Tips and Tricks | 4 Comments

The reliability of Reachability

Posted on September 3, 2013 by Josh Smith

Mike Ash’s blog post about Apple’s networking API, called Reachability, has spawned a very interesting and eye-opening discussion in its comments. The post can be found here Friday Q&A 2013-06-14: Reachability The two main points I took away from this are: … Continue reading →

Posted in Networking | Comments Off

iOS questions from a WPF developer

Posted on June 5, 2013 by Josh Smith

While vacationing in Hawaii recently I was contacted by a developer named Peter who had some iOS programming questions for me. Peter’s background is in WPF, just like me, and he is now moving into iOS programming (welcome to the … Continue reading →

Posted in iOS Programming for .NET Developers, Tips and Tricks | 5 Comments

Objective-C workflow for iOS apps

Posted on March 24, 2013 by Josh Smith

This article reviews a simple, lightweight Objective-C workflow component for iOS applications. The source code and demo app can be downloaded from GitHub and freely used under the permissive MIT license. Repository: https://github.com/ijoshsmith/iOS-Workflow Workflow as a conceptual tool Workflow diagrams are often … Continue reading →

Posted in iOS 6, Objective-C | 2 Comments

Slides from iOS for .NET Devs presentation

Posted on January 29, 2013 by Josh Smith

Recently I spoke at the Southeast Valley .NET User Group, in Arizona, about iOS programming from a .NET developer’s perspective. I really enjoyed speaking to the group and they had a bunch of good questions for me. Sharing my experiences … Continue reading →

Posted in iOS Programming for .NET Developers | Comments Off

Deciding between native iOS and Xamarin (MonoTouch)

Posted on January 4, 2013 by Josh Smith

An old friend of mine, who I worked with back when I was a .NET developer, emailed me recently. He was looking for some advice on which platform to use for creating iOS software, mostly focusing on native versus Xamarin … Continue reading →

Posted in MonoTouch, Objective-C | 8 Comments