Niklas Saers
Featured Post

Spec-Driven AI Development

You write a prompt, hit enter, and watch the console light up green. Code pours out. It feels like magic. Then you try to maintain the thing a week later, and you realize your shiny new AI agent just built a leaking bucket.

Recent Writing

October 6, 2011 • General

Rest in Peace, Steve Jobs

Dear Steve,
you have shown us that we don't understand what we think we understand, and must redo what we think is done, in order to go forward. You've tought us not to accept mediocracy, not from ourselves and not from the world around us. Strive for passionate perfection, every day, with love. Love for what we do and those that surround us.

September 28, 2011 • Discussion

iTunes movie purchase and rental available in

Finally, after having sent mails to people high up at Apple, signing petitions, joining groups and blogging about it for many years, iTunes movie rental and purchase is coming to Scandinavia, possibly the world. That is great, we have been missing it for ages. Thank you, Apple, for allowing us to send you money ;-) Like many other people, I'm looking forward to trying out this service, especially the rental service.

September 24, 2011 • iOS

Mercurial tagging for XCode

I've used many version control systems, but this week has been the first time I've used Mercurial for anything more than a bit of testing. It looks good to me, so I read a bit around to see how people are using it in their projects, and I came accross Lajos Kamocsay's post about how he includes Mercurials branch and revision information in his Xcode projects that I think deserves a shout-out.

August 31, 2011 • iOS

Updating an Address Book record

When updating an Address Book record in Cocoa, I read that I had modify the record using ABRecordSetValue(). But it wouldn't change. Even if I called ABAddressBookSave() afterwards, it just wouldn't change. It turns out I had to call ABAddressBookAddRecord() also. There is no ABAddressBookUpdateRecord(), but it turns out that the ABAddressBookAddRecord function does the same. I expected that it would give me a duplicate record, but it does not, it updates the existing record. Glad to have that sorted out, I hope this helps you as well.

August 14, 2011 • General

A quick & comprehensive guide type guide

I'm sorry if this is all over the net today, but I really find this a great info graphic, by Noodlor. I link directly to his graphic:
A quick & comprehensive guide type guide

August 13, 2011 • iOS

Extending iMessage

I hate instant messaging. Not because I don't like talking to people, but because there are so many networks I have to be part of, and once I'm signed up I have to use this program or that program, which means I have to have a ton of programs running, or I can wait a while and get a program that does a half decent job at implementing many different networks and then have a few more programs running to open what that program doesn't support. So I log off, and never log back in again. I would really like to use IM, I would really like to be more available that way, but it's such a hassle.

August 13, 2011 • FreeBSD

Android isn\'t open source, what now\?

So Google's admitted that Android is not open source. Some parts are, some parts are not. That's the same with iOS. Many parts of iOS are from open source projects (I'll mention cups, the printer stack on many Linux systems, that is very much supported by Apple, even though it's GPL). Heck, even Microsoft Windows has components from open source projects (the ftp client being my favourite example). To me, it's not so much about these projects being open source, as what do they give back to the open source projects.

August 11, 2011 • iOS

Tapptics

I thought I'd give Tapptics a little plug. I love writing nice applications for the iPhone, but taking on a graphics artist for pet projects is sometimes a bit hard to justify. But a while ago I read about Tapptics and saw their site and bookmarked the article so I could come back to it when I had a project where I needed some graphics. That time has come, so I signed up and it's just a bucket full of resources, both nice tutorials and guides, and a lot of excellent graphics to use in my app. There were, however, two glyphs that I wanted that weren't there, but no sooner had I enquired about them, had Jen whipped them up: two gorgeous glyphs that will have a prominent position in my app. The price is well worth it, so go check Jen's site out today. If you're an app developer and need nice graphics, you'll love it! :-)

July 31, 2011 • iOS

Converting OCUnit output to something Jenkins can understand

I'm working on setting up my continuous integration system to work with Xcode. I'm using Jenkins on a separate Mac Mini, and I found this great article by Christian Hedin where he introduces his ocunit2junit.rb utility that converts the output of OCUnit to something looking like JUnit, thus making it easier for Jenkins to pick integrate with the build.