Adam Bell - Blog

Blogging in Swift (Part 3) (aka Vapor time)

Thu, 2 Apr 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Introduction

This post follows where my server-side Swift Kitura adventures left off.

Some sad news came about when it was announced that Kitura was winding down, and I realized that, since I built my blog using

Visualizing Xcode's View Debugger

Wed, 24 Jul 2019 00:00:00 GMT

A couple days ago I noticed a really weird bug, images that had been used as templates would occasionally draw darker or lighter (rather than the color originally chosen). I thought it was just some weird duplicate layer ontop of another layer that would lead to the icon being darker / light

Blogging in Swift (Part 2)

Wed, 29 May 2019 00:00:00 GMT

Introduction

This post follows where the first part left off.

Now that you've written a blog, or whatever you'd like as part of server-side Swift, the next step is to get it hosted somewhere and running all the time. Personally, I use DigitalOcean for my hosting running an Ubuntu VPS. Most of the instructions here are fairly generic, but depending on the distribution of Linux (or Unix) you're running, you ma

Blogging in Swift

Wed, 17 Apr 2019 00:00:00 GMT

Introduction

Recently I attended try! Swift in Tokyo, Japan (which was an absolutely fantastic conference), and there I heard about a lot of folks that were using (or beginning to use) Swift on the Server. Now that Swift has reached version 5, and its ABI is stable, I thought it'd be a great time to try it out for myself. I didn't really know what to write, but I saw that @stroughtonsmith had recently rewritten his blog as a static one being

Making Truly Native Native Apps on Apple Watch

Sun, 13 Sep 2015 00:00:00 GMT

Just wanted to add a bit of commentary to Steven’s awesome writeup on the UIKit hax we did with Apple Watch… :D

WatchKit apps are handcuffed, as it were, only able to display UI through the elements WatchKit provides. They cannot get the position of touches onscreen, or use swipe gestures, or multitouch.

Seriously, it’s horrible. Being able t

Making Passbook an Address Book

Tue, 6 May 2014 00:00:00 GMT

Intro

Ever since Apple first announced Passbook two years ago, I've always liked the idea of using it to store business cards.

However, it'd be far more useful if it could store Pokemon cards... someone should file a radar on that...

Every year at WWDC (and any conference really) it's super fun to play the "trading card game" and collect various business cards from people. Some are really cool, some are so fantastic that the people that gave you

Here Fishy Fishy

Fri, 24 Jan 2014 00:00:00 GMT

Intro

I'm not a huge vim person... yet. I like IDEs, usually... (I'm looking at you Visual Studio). Therefore I'll only really use a shell for cycript or other random ssh sessions and hax and such.

However, fish is making the shell fun.

What the fish?

So what is fish anyways? While it sounds like the result of preparations of a sushi plate, i

Dynamic iOS Multitasking

Tue, 14 Jan 2014 00:00:00 GMT

Intro

iOS 4 brought us the wonderful feature to switch between apps quickly, and iOS 7 made this even more interactive through use of live previews of apps.

I noticed an article written by @vpdn shared on twitter about making this switcher a little more lively through use of curated app content for multitasking. In other words, re-p

Breaking Chat Heads Out of the iOS Sandbox

Tue, 14 Jan 2014 00:00:00 GMT

Background Info

On April 12th, 2013, Facebook released Facebook Home, a completely new mobile experience available solely to Android users. With Home came Chat Heads, a wickedly cool way to chat with your friends, in a way that makes that “face-to-face conversation experience” a little more feasible with text messaging. The minute I saw it, I thought “I can make this!”.

Using box2d as a boilerplate, I started working with giving contact photos the same (or simila

QNX Native Binaries and the Blackberry Playbook

Thu, 5 May 2011 00:00:00 GMT

So as you may already be aware of, RIM just released their take on how tablets should be, also known as PlayBook. The PlayBook currently runs QNX as it's operating system, with which its apps are currently built in conjunction with the Adobe AIR 2.5 SDK. Just recently at the BlackBerry World Conference, the native SDK was unveiled (it was previously seen with their Quake 3 port).

Personally, I see the Native SDK as the most interesting, as it allows one to use the device

afc2 and Finder

Thu, 27 May 2010 00:00:00 GMT

For a while now I've been checking up on a fabulous project entitled Disk for iPhone (formerly known as iPhoneDisk). Based on the MobileDevice API, it's a filesystem for MacFuse, which allows one to mount an iDevice in Finder. However having my iPod jailbroken I wanted to take advantage of the afc2 protocol. Low and behold, after compiling the source and installing the required daemons/extensions, the mobile_fs_util LaunchAgent's preferences can be edited to your likings. Edit t

Hello World

Thu, 20 May 2010 00:00:00 GMT

`NSLog(@"hello world");`

hello world