Simon Wolf's Writings

Whilst I was developing avTag I started using HockeyApp to distribute builds to beta testers. As part of that process I decided to follow their advice and configure my project so that I could have debug, beta and App Store builds all installed on devices concurrently. You then have access to the three states of your application quickly and easily. However I found some of the configuration notes slightly confusing and although Andreas Linde gave me some very handy notes I've decided to write things up in a more agnostic way. I wholeheartedly recommend HockeyApp but realise that some of you are either tied in to things like TestFlight or simply don't use a distribution service.

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• #cocoa

One aspect of FTS is that you need to 'sanitise' the text you are searching for. For example, if your source text was 'École' then you want it to be matched if the search term is something like 'ecole' or 'Ecole' or 'école'.

I've previously touched on this where I suggested using a possibly flawed NSString category to strip diacritic marks from the text you were storing in an FTS table.

I've now been told about an alternative.

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• #cocoa

Since publishing my post about FTS a few people have asked me which versions of iOS and OS X support FTS in the bundled version of SQLite. I can confirm that iOS 5.1 does and so does OS X 10.7.5.

Since I don't have a vast plethora of devices and OS X installs handy I've created test projects for people to use for their own testing needs.

If you test earlier OS versions than those listed above and they do support FTS then please let me know.

I’m @sgaw on Twitter, @sw on App.net and you can also email me at simon at this domain.

• #cocoa

I've just read a news story about a man whose careless driving resulted in the death of a cyclist in Scotland. He has been ordered to carry out 300 hours of community service.

Tragically Gary McCourt was also found guilty in 1986 of causing another cyclist's death by reckless driving.

His punishment seems quite lenient to me, particularly since, according to Sheriff James Scott "Mrs Fyffe wasn't to blame in any way for the accident.". Unfortunately he also said, "However, she was not wearing a safety helmet and that in my view contributed to her death."

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• #cycling

Over the last 24 hours or so a news story (see the links to some of the coverage at the end of this post for examples) has been developing regarding 'tagging' dementia sufferers so that they can be tracked. The evolution of the story has made me thing about our perspective of things as developers.

Full Disclosure: The device mentioned below is one that my father supplies through his company, MindMe. It is this association that has made me aware of the coverage.

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• #technology

At NSConference 5 I presented a talk entitled 'Searching for Speedy Searching'. The talk was about how you can use SQLite's Full Text Search (FTS) to add full text searching to your Cocoa applications quickly and easily.

A week ago I published a blog post where I made the slides I used in my talk available and posted a couple of corrections to things I'd said. The main purpose of this post is to go into detail about implementing FTS in an iOS application which uses Core Data. All of the basics will be covered but you still might want to take a look at the slides for a more detailed overview.

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• #cocoa

Just as the WWDC tickets went on sale and sold out Mathew Waters asked me if avTag would be out before the WWDC videos come out. The quantity of WWDC videos and the problem with finding specific content in them again was the initial spark which made me devise the concept of avTag so I replied with a very rash decision. I made an even worse one since then.

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• #avtag

Today the 5,000 or so tickets for WWDC, Apple's annual developer conference, sold out in a couple of minutes. That's a new record. In 2008 the conference sold out for the first time but it took two months. In 2009 it sold out in one month, in 2010 it took a week. 2011 took that down to a day and in 2012 the tickets were available for 70 minutes. The increasing demand for tickets is despite Apple making the session videos freely available within days of the conference and this year they are intending to post videos of the sessions during the conference.

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• #cocoa

At NSConference 5 I presented a talk entitled 'Searching for Speedy Searching'. The talk was about how you can use SQLite's Full Text Search (FTS) to add fast text searching to your Cocoa applications quickly and easily. During the talk I said that I'd be publishing a blog post going into some of the details I brushed over. This isn't it. This is a pre-post post to correct a couple of things I said in the talk and to let you know where you can get the video and slides from.

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• #cocoa

I sat down to write this post without realising that it was just over a year ago that I wrote a post covering a lot of what I wanted to write about today... only more optimistically. Having deleted the original draft of today's post I can now just link to last year's which was all about my intention to buy a bike, cycle, lose weight and get fit. Easy, right? Well no. I failed miserably in 2012.

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• #cycling