More Followup on Sharing Data With WatchKit Extensions

Reader Erich Graham emailed me some more followup on a recent series of posts I wrote about WatchKit extensions. There are new NSNotifications available in iOS 8.2 (since beta 5) that extensions can use to monitor for host app state changes:

Added NSExtensionHostDidBecomeActiveNotification
Added NSExtensionHostDidEnterBackgroundNotification
Added NSExtensionHostWillEnterForegroundNotification
Added NSExtensionHostWillResignActiveNotification

Erich writes:

I reached out to Apple about your File Coordinators point in this post and I was advised that the technical note was out-of-date, and as of 8.2 Beta 5, there are background/foreground methods for extensions, and File Coordination is recommended.

Great to hear. I look forward to rethinking these problems.

|  13 Mar 2015




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|  16 Jan 2015




Taking the Time to Thank Your Mentors

In the latest issue of Objc.io, Andy Matuschak (a former lead UIKit engineer at Apple, now elsewhere) writes about his experience at Apple:

I was fortunate enough to be able to pester a few people into spending a fair amount of time teaching me things, and in certain cases I made mistakes egregious enough to have people spend their time teaching me things without requiring pestering. […] The industry is an interesting place right now, because it’s flooded by new grads, and the new grads are noisy and they’re on Twitter and they’re the ones that are speaking at conferences. But this industry has been around for a while. And there sure are a whole lot of software engineers with 15 or 20 years of professional experience in the field, and they’re not as noisy. You don’t read stuff by them all the time. They’re mostly locked away in companies, where they can’t talk, but they sure do know a lot.

On a spectrum from total beginner to one of Matuschak’s obscure mentors, most days I still feel like a newcomer. But when I dare to peek at my code from a few years ago, it’s obvious how much I’ve matured as a developer. There are lots of people to thank for that growth. Matuschak’s interview brought to mind all the people who have mentored me. Some of them might not even realize how much they were teaching me at the time.

So to:

and many others — thanks for taking the time to help me grow.

|  14 Jan 2015




[Sponsor] Digit

Everyone feels like they should be saving more money. However saving money is hard and stressful. That’s why we built Digit. Digit automatically saves money for you, so you don’t have to think about it. Our hope is, with Digit, we can remove some of the money stress from our lives. So far Digit has saved over $700,000 for our members.

Today we’re sharing more invites to Digit.

Anyone who uses this link, not only will be able to sign up for Digit today. But will also get jump started with a free $5 in their Digit savings.

Note from Jared: Digit looks seriously cool. Even cooler that all that great tech sits atop an FDIC-insured savings account. If you’re anything like my wife and I, then you have trouble sticking to a budget. Watch their Sandwich video to learn more. I love the playful, off-kilter animations.

This post is sponsored via Syndicate Ads.

|  11 Jan 2015




Anthony Bourdain on Showing Up on Time

This, seven ways from Sunday, emphatically this:

Q: What’s the best advice you ever received from anyone? Who gave it? And when?

A: Show up on time. I learned this from the mentor who I call Bigfoot in Kitchen Confidential. If you didn’t show up 15 minutes exactly before your shift — if you were 13 minutes early — you lost the shift, you were sent home. The second time you were fired. It is the basis of everything. I make all my major decisions on other people based on that. Give the people you work with or deal with or have relationships with the respect to show up at the time you said you were going to. And by that I mean, every day, always and forever. Always be on time. It is a simple demonstration of discipline, good work habits, and most importantly respect for other people. As an employee, it was a hugely important expression of respect, and as an employer, I quickly came to understand that there are two types of people in this world: There are the type of people who are going to live up to what they said they were going to do yesterday, and then there are people who are full of shit. And that’s all you really need to know. If you can’t be bothered to show up, why should anybody show up? It’s just the end of the fucking world.

Excerpted from this Men’s Journal interview.

|  7 Jan 2015