NSHipster - iOS Resource of the Day

Just about every platform and programming language has way more features than any one person can explore. That’s a real shame because a lot of these overlooked features are really cool. Thankfully for Objective-C and Cocoa/UIKit we have today’s wonderful iOS resource, NSHipster.

NSHipster - A journal of the overlooked bits in Obj-C and Cocoa

NSHipster is the brainchild of Mattt Thompson (yes, that’s Mattt with 3 T’s…he’s the Mobile Lead and Heroku and the creator of the wonderful AFNetworking library) and is a weekly journal of some of the cooler but often overlooked aspects of Objective-C and Cocoa/UIKit. The oldest article listed is dated July 12, 2012 so there are plenty of articles to read here.

One of the more recent articles dealt with iOS7. With Apple touting 1500 new APIs there was a ton of new material in iOS7. Rather than hitting on the ones everyone else was talking about, NSHipster chose to focus on some of the more interesting bits that might go overlooked like CIDetectorSmile and CIDetectorEyeBlink, AVSpeechSynthesizer, and MKDistanceFormatter.

Other posts are centered around improving your productivity as a developer. If you’re an Xcode developer, you’ll definitely want to check out the posts about Xcode key bindings and gestures and Xcode snippets. The post about xctool is all about helping you control the build process for your applications.

If books are more your thing, you’ll definitely want to check out the first edition of NSHipster as a PDF. The book combines articles from the site as well as new material written just for the book. It’s available for $19.

Summary

NSHipster is an amazing resource that looks into the uncharted bits and pieces of Objective-C and Cocoa/UIKit. Since many of the APIs and features discussed on the site are applicable to Xamarin developers, people doing iOS development using C# should definitely check this out as well. There are some great articles to read on NSHipster and I’d recommend reading them all!

Contact

If you want to comment or reach out to me, the best place to do that is on Twitter @brentschooley. I can also be reached via email at bschooley@infragistics.com.