Archive for November 22, 2014

Saturday, November 22, 2014

Updating Before Migrating to New Mac

Dave Winer:

It’s normally very easy to migrate, but this time they threw a curveball at me. In order to use the Migration Assistant, I have to upgrade the previous machine (the one I’m typing this on) to the latest Mac OS. That’s exactly what I don’t want to do. This is my safety net against incompatibilities in the new version of the OS.

That seems like a strange requirement for that reason—and also because the old Mac might not be able to run the latest OS. Apple’s documentation says:

Migration Assistant in Mavericks and Yosemite can transfer information from other computers that have OS X Snow Leopard v10.6.8 or later installed. If you’re migrating from a computer with an earlier version of OS X, update your older computer first, or manually copy your data from one computer to another.

Perhaps he misunderstood, and Migration Assistant only wanted him to update from 10.8.2 to 10.8.5. I don’t envy the person who had to write that error message.

Monodraw

I have been enjoying following the development of Helftone’s upcoming Monodraw ASCII art editor. I’m not sure that I would ever need to use such an application, but it is such an interesting idea, executed with characteristic passion and attention to detail. Inspiring.

Pricing Determines Your Business

Jason Cohen:

Price is inextricably linked to brand, product, and purchasing decisions — by whom, why, how, and when. Price is not an exercise in maximizing some micro-economic supply/demand curve, slapped post-facto onto the product. Rather, it fundamentally determines the nature of the product and the structure of the business that produces it.

Core Data Relationships Data Loss Bug

Tom Harrington notes that several developers (including James Dempsey and Rich Siegel) have encountered a bug with Core Data’s -[NSPersistentStoreCoordinator migratePersistentStore:toURL:options:withType:error:] method. This is supposed to copy the data store from one location to another, e.g. for making a backup. The frameworks may also call the method on your behalf, e.g. if the user does a Save As. The bug is that, on Yosemite and iOS 8, the method discards many-to-many relationships. This is actually worse than corrupting the file because the new file will still be readable, so it may not be obvious that it’s missing some of the data. The bug is reputed to affect all store types.

(DropDMG and EagleFiler use Core Data but not many-to-many relationships, so I don’t think they are affected.)

Update (2014-11-24): Harrington has filed a bug and posted a sample project.

Update (2015-03-10): This is fixed in Mac OS X 10.10.2 and iOS 8.2.

What Makes Clang So Special

CoderGears (via Maxime Chevalier):

The most important difference of its design is that Clang is based on LLVM, the idea behind LLVM is to use LLVM Intermediate Representation (IR), it’s like the bytecode for java. LLVM IR is designed to host mid-level analyses and transformations that you find in the optimizer section of a compiler. It was designed with many specific goals in mind, including supporting lightweight runtime optimizations, cross-function/interprocedural optimizations, whole program analysis, and aggressive restructuring transformations, etc. The most important aspect of it, though, is that it is itself defined as a first class language with well-defined semantics.

The Trials and Tribulations of Writing a 3rd Party iOS Keyboard

Alexei Baboulevitch (via iOS Dev Weekly):

I recently released my first commercial project: Translit Keyboard, a 3rd party keyboard for iPhone that lets you transliterate Latin characters into Cyrillic and some other alphabets.

[…]

This was a satisfying project to work on, giving me great insight into Swift, autolayout (since removed), Core Graphics, and a bit of Interface Builder. But it also gave me experience with something that I had yet to encounter in my sheltered iOS development existence: the horror of undercooked Apple frameworks and tools.

Below are as many of the problems I encountered during development as I can remember. I have high hopes that these will be fixed over the next few years, but until then, perhaps this article will help some poor programmer in dire straits!

Copyright © 2000–2024 Michael Tsai.