Learning a new programming language is a lot of fun, but it can be disorienting to not have all of your usual tools in your mental toolbox, so to speak.  We get used to using our familiar patterns and syntax, and even though the new language may be just as capable, it takes some getting used to in order to have the same level of productivity.  It’s been over a year since I started working on iOS apps in Objective C, and still I sometimes find myself searching for ways to write a block of code that I could write ...

If you happen to be experienced in development using Visual Studio, but a bit new to working in XCode for iOS development (like me), you are probably used to your application breaking on exceptions during debugging.  But by default, your iOS application may not act as you expect when it comes to debugging crash exceptions.  You may instead see something like this:

With an error message that says: 

*** Terminating app due to uncaught exception

What?  Why was my exception uncaught while I am debugging?  I, for one, would rather be taken to the point at which the exception ...

Apple does a lot of neat things with images in iOS, and many times we get the benefits of shiny, chrome-like effects on our images without really doing anything.

If you create a new tabbed application in XCode, the default setup will give you two tabs, with square and round images in the tab bar for the tabs.

Note the shiny blue appearance of the selected tab.  So, what do the original images look like?  Pretty boring, actually:  just a plain black circle and square.

Wow, that's a quite a difference.  Pretty cool, right?  I thought so too.  But then ...