Coding tip: readability first!

In this 'Coding tip' I'll introduce you to one of the most sustainable coding tip of mine IMO. You may or may not agree with me but this has proven to be a valuable tip for me in terms of coding maintainability.

This one tip is was I call 'put material where the work needs to be done'. It is the opposite of offshoring :)

Coding tip: early exit

In this series of 'coding tips' articles I will show you some of the lesson learned tips I am using on a daily basis during development. They are general purpose tips which can easily be adapted to most development languages.

The first one is what I call Early exit. 

Push Notifications to Apple, made... almost reliable!

For one of my projects I need to push informations to iOS devices. Apple has made a great doc on how to implement push notifications but as a matter of fact the ideal world of the documentation is not the one most developers experiment when dealing with push notifications to Apple's servers.

The thing that bothers most of us is the lack, or at least the manner, of feedback when a notification is sent. That is asynchro-loosly ;)

expressjs with ... no layout ?!

Yesterday, I was working on a backoffice web application I will be releasing soon for one of my iOS projects. This web application is powered by node.js. I love node.js.
When it comes to creating web apps with nodejs I first had tried to managed all the routing aspects and stuff myself but lately I crossed expressjs.
expressjs is not as overbloated as most web frameworks in my opinion. I like simple stuff because when it comes to debug or extend the thing it's always easier. And it happened, I had to get my hands into expressjs because it appears that the layout abilities were removed from expressjs since 3.0.

The solution they (the developers) give is to have two separate files which you will include in any view before and after your custom content. Something like (with ejs engine):

<%- include 'top.ejs' %>
my custom content
<%- include 'bottom.ejs' %>

As a former ruby on rails developer, I am used to partials and layouts, so this workaround is rather repelling to me.

Yet an other Objective-C block for fun

You know what, I could not live without blocks... It's sad but true.

Action blocks!

If you read all my previous block posts you now know how to use a block in a NSTimer. It's pretty neat and few people did take the time to say so in the comments which is great!

Now let's push the principle in the UI land. How about a block as target/action for any UIControl subclass ? That would be great not to have to write an other delegate method...

Easy Updating of UITableView-s

When it comes to update a UITableView you have two choices. Either you reload the whole UITableView by sending a reload message or you can do differential updates by inserting, deleting and reloading rows with changed contents.

However it may be somehow difficult to always succeed in differential updates. Very often a UITableView assertion error falls down. And it can become very confusing with many sections etc...

Seamless downloads with MCCURLConnection

I already told you about this class of mine which is a queued NSURLConnection with block delegates.  I use it as a ASIHTTPRequest replacement. Now it's been updated (here) and there are new features I'm going to show you.