Another usability related blog from me after a long time and now, it’s a mobile vs web debate. While not exactly a rant, I intend to bridge the gap between web designers and mobile designers. Information architecture on mobile In the web 2.0 era, not much thought or discussion was spent on how to organize your content on your website. Primary reason could be because, there were easier workarounds to get away with this. For example,...

If you are a iOS developer and make your daily bread by writing iOS apps, these are three software applications that can dramatically improve your productivity and quality of your coding. 1) Code Pilot My first favorite software is a XCode plugin called Code Pilot. It is a nifty plugin that, I would say, is QuickSilver for XCode. Jump into a file, or a method within a file within a couple of keystrokes. It matches your keystroke with...

Few days ago, I wrote a post on my review on Windows Phone. While I have been a Microsoft basher (no not really), Windows Phone is one product that surprised me (and I think most other bloggers as well) and took the smart phone UI to the next level. While Microsoft has been known to make killer user interfaces like Microsoft Fluent UI aka Ribbon, and the famous Start Menu on Windows 95, they haven’t been doing much recently. While...

Update 4: (8th July 2011) MKStoreKit 4.0, an updated version of the one presented here is available. Please check it out and use 4.0 instead of this. Around last year this time, I wrote a singleton class, MKStoreKit, and a blog post, wrapping Apple’s StoreKit framework and it has been quite popular. From the email responses I receive, I could say, it’s been in use in more than thousands of apps on the AppStore. It has been very...

In this RESTful world, access to any modern data-rich website is restricted with some kind of authentication mechanism. Several known open authentication mechanisms used on Web are HTTP Basic (RFC 1945) and HTTP Digest authentication (RFC 2617). While discussing Basic or Digest itself is a separate blog post, or a lengthy boring Wikipedia article, coding it in Objective C is not. No, I’m not talking about ASIHTTPRequest. While ASI is...

Every programmer will one day realize that Git is easily the best available source code control on the planet. I was a fervent follower of SVN so far and even wrote SVN is the best source code control. The only reason that daunted me to use Git is to use the command line interface. But, if you master the command line, Git is all yours to command. Moreover, with tighter integration of XCode 4 and Git, I think it’s a great idea to...