I’ve got so many little ‘personal projects’ going right now that I’m starting to not work on one for stressing about not working on another.  Most of these are just for fun, but I want them to be either something or nothing one way or another; because something about them being in a formless limbo as semi-functioning code on my hard drive depresses me.

So simply, any projects laying around my drive which are/were intended to be products of sorts will be either released live/on the App store, pushed to Github, or deleted. By say…end of June, 2013.

A couple of months ago I threw together a very quick Private Beta script written in PHP so I could host an app I was working on and get some users into it without letting the whole of the internet into it at the same time.

I’ve been working on another project with a friend recently and we’ll be reaching the point very soon where we want to let people in, but not the whole of the internet.  So I resurrected this project a little and did some refactoring, finished some off some of the functionality, added some styling, and chucked it up on Github.  I’ve called the project phpPrivateBeta inline with all those other phpWhatever projects and I hope to get a bit more time to work on it and turn it into something that will be genuinely useful to PHP developers who want to get their app out to a select few in a hurry.

The Git repo is here: http://github.com/tobygundry/phpPrivateBeta

I’ve just discovered that Zombies have an amazing innate ability to tell when you’re messaging deallocated objects…

Enable Zombie Objects in XCode:

[Product] -> [Edit Scheme] -> [Run] -> [Diagnostics] -> [Objective-C] -> [Enable Zombie Objects]

And an NSZombie Object will be put in place of deallocated (reference count = 0) objects, so if you send a message to something that doesn’t exist anymore, you can find it really easily when the time comes.

So if you do something like this (just imagine it’s not such an obvious problem):

1. NSString* zombieString =
2.    [[NSString alloc] initWithUTF8String:"Grr, brains! Argh"];
3. [zombieString dealloc];
4. [zombieString substringFromIndex:1];

You’ll get a nice console message like this:

1. 2013-01-18 23:22:32.780 Zombie Test[9544:c07] *** -[__NSCFString substringFromIndex:]: message sent to deallocated instance 0x745dbf0

…BRAINS!

CloudFlare is a service that offers the benefits of a CDN with some automatic optimisation and security features chucked in.  In this post I’m going to show the difference in load times of my blog before and after using CloudFlare. I’ll do this using a few popular tools for measuring web performance, Google PageSpeed Insights, Pingdom Tools and YSlow. Continue to full post

iOS 6 included many updates for Safari, one of which was the Web Inspector which allows you to debug mobile websites in the same way you’re used to for normal websites using Firebug or Inspect Element or the equivalent in other browsers.

Web Inspector takes a small amount of setup to get going, but once it is you can browse the code being delivered to your device on your desktop, debug and hot swap code and see the result on the actual device in real time. Continue to full post

I recently took on my first responsive web design (RWD) project, a.k.a, this blog. When I started I didn’t know much about RWD, which is partially why I decided to use my own blog as my lab rat. Along the way I learned the same lessons learned by just about everyone else who’s taken on the challenge, such as the joys of responsive images.

But one thing I learned that I haven’t seen mentioned anywhere yet, is how useful non-shorthand CSS properties become in responsive coding, especially when coming back to make tweaks to the stylesheet… Continue to full post

Over the past few weeks I’ve been spending some of my spare time slowly redesigning my blog. The main reason for the redesign was to create a responsive design, and I was a bit bored of my old one which I had even switched out for the default WordPress theme in recent times. Continue to full post

A little while ago I wrote a post about an iOS App I was developing called Petrol Miser – since then there’s been a name change to Petrol Mate, a few code tweaks and some more graphic design work to prepare for submission; but Petrol Mate is now available as a free download in the App Store! Continue to full post

RedBeanPHP is an ORM system that allows you to write your PHP apps really quickly. Essentially RBPHP development boils down to asking for a new object from the RB API, adding member variables (properties) to that object as you wish then telling RB to save that object. If there’s a table for that kind of object already, it gets added to that. Otherwise the table is created for you on the fly and data types are inferred from the data you have given i.e. “Mouse Trap” would be a varchar, 2.99 would be a double.

I’ll start off by showing you the entire PC Parts Database app I built (pretty quickly) using RedBeanPHP and then go through each block of code explaining what it does and what’s happening to the database behind the scenes. Continue to full post

Petrol Miser is an iPhone App I’ve developed for helping drivers utilise their fuel discount vouchers as much as possible. The App has been finished for a little while now, with the only thing holding me back from submitting to the App Store being the graphics work for the icon and launch screens.

I’ve just finished my logo, I sketched up a few different designs on paper, then drafted the final design in Illustrator.

Here it is: Continue to full post