Sometimes all you’re really looking for is a basic chunk of code to get something done. For example, I was working on an application yesterday and needed to display the current date in text format: October 29, 2008. A simple concept for sure, however, with the many nuances of date formatters, it takes some time to pull together the “right” code.
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In a previous post I introduced how to use #pragma mark to help navigate source files within Xcode. There are several additional tags that can be used within a source file to call out specific code or content.
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Although a tad bit off topic, it’s Mac related none-the-less. I am in the midst of backing up my MacBook Pro to a remote drive as I’ll be buying one of the new machines recently announced by Apple.

As part of the process, I am creating an image of my current system on a USB drive, using the Disk Utility application. The idea is to create a bootable image on the USB drive, verify that I can boot from the drive and use that image for the new machine. If all goes well, the process of configuring my new system such be nothing more than restoring the image on USB to the new system, in theory.
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If you’ve found a need to work with JSON (including with the iPhone), I want to point you to an excellent Google code project: http://code.google.com/p/json-framework/. The author of this framework can be found here.

This framework implements a strict JSON parser and generator in Objective-C. It’s easy to work with and can be used across any number of projects with ease.
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Geoff Teehan at teehan+lax sent me a link to a Photoshop PSD file they created to help quickly create mockups of iPhone applications.

If you’ve spent any amount of time scrambling to create a prototype, you’ll greatly appreciate how much tools such as this can help. The screenshot below gives you an idea of how the assets look in Photoshop.

Here is a link to another PSD from 320480, which was the catalyst for Geoff and his team in creating their own tool.

A friend in San Francisco, Rodney Aiglstorfer, was recently jumping through hoops to get Xcode to cooperate with his iPhone. There’s nothing more aggravating than having your application running within the simulator and getting stuck downloading to a device.

At one point in the process he opted to remove the Xcode developer tools and start the configuration from the beginning. Which leads to the tip: should you ever find the need to remove Xcode, run the following from within a terminal window to make it happen:

sudo <Xcode>/Library/uninstall-devtools --mode=all

<Xcode> is the directory where the tools are installed. For typical installations the full path is /Developer/Library/uninstall-devtools

Easy enough, just make sure this is what you really intend to do as once it’s gone, it’s gone.

I’ve started using #pragma mark directives in my code to help with organization as my implementation files grow. #pragma mark is simple to use, for example, insert the following to call out initialization code:

#pragma mark -
#pragma mark Initialization

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