Solar Powered Birdhouse
The Atomic Birdhouse19 May 2022
In my last couple of posts I’ve talked about the hardware and software behind my birdhouse camera project.
The Atomic Birdhouse
atomicbird.comadded August 2026
top 46%Raspberry Pi Birdhouse Software
The Atomic Birdhouse9 May 2022
In my last post I went over the components of the bird house camera I set up this year to get a better look at the local black-capped chickadees.
Raspberry Pi Birdhouse Camera
The Atomic Birdhouse7 May 2022
My current non-app related project has taken me out into the back yard, but brought along my coding and technical experience.
Clash of the Optionals
The Atomic Birdhouse21 Jan 2022
…or, how to accidentally break Swift initialization rules. Today I’m going to talk about optionals. Swift optionals. And also another kind of optional.
Core Data Using Only Code
The Atomic Birdhouse8 Nov 2021
If you know anything about Core Data, you’re probably aware of Xcode’s built-in model editor. If you’ve used Core Data, you’ve probably spent more time with it than you care to remember.
Stumping People for 1000* Years
The Atomic Birdhouse2 Sept 2021
* Base 2 Last week at 360iDev I hosted the 8th edition of Stump 360. Stump is an evening event that, to my surprise as much as anyone else’s, has become a tradition at 360iDev. What is Stump 360?
Core Data Backups, Redux
The Atomic Birdhouse29 Mar 2021
This is the second of two posts following up on my earlier post about backing up and restoring Core Data.
Mostly Undocumented
The Atomic Birdhouse25 Mar 2021
Last year I wrote about backing up and restoring Core Data. Recently Arnaud Joubay messaged me to ask about it. I used a method called migratePersistentStore(...) to duplicate a persistent store.
Backing up Core Data Stores
The Atomic Birdhouse26 May 2020
Today we’re going to travel back in time a little with Core Data. Or at least find out how your app can do so. What if you want to make a backup copy of your app’s data?
Adding thumbnails with PDFKit
The Atomic Birdhouse15 Apr 2020
Today I’m continuing with some ideas from my recent post about using PDFKit. In that post I was using a custom PDF view for an app that would work something like a basic slide presentation app.
JSON vs Property Lists, Revisited
The Atomic Birdhouse3 Mar 2020
In a previous post I wrote about How JSON compares to Apple property lists and the obstacles to converting data between them. That was a while ago but the post is still accurate, as far as it goes.
Getting started with PDFKit
The Atomic Birdhouse26 Feb 2020
In my post about my custom presentation slide app I mentioned that because of time constraints, I decided against doing my own slide layout.
Interactive Presentation Slides at 360iDev
The Atomic Birdhouse28 Jan 2020
This is a story of how a trip to a karaoke bar led to me writing my own app to display presentation slides.
Better logging with Emoji
The Atomic Birdhouse17 Jan 2020
Apple’s developer tools provide a rich variety of debugging aids. Sometimes though, it’s useful to do things the old fashioned way.
Data Detection in Swift
The Atomic Birdhouse25 Oct 2017
I have a love/hate relationship with regular expressions. I love them because they’re great for examining text to find useful information and, often, to change the text in some way.
Migrating from Dropbox
The Atomic Birdhouse10 Nov 2016
Over the past year or so I’ve been trying out Resilio Sync (formerly BitTorrent Sync) as a possible alternative to Dropbox. It’s gradually improved to where I think I can rely on it.
Date Math is Hard, Let's Do it Tomorrow
The Atomic Birdhouse6 Nov 2016
This post is based on a lightning talk I gave at CocoaConf San Jose a couple of days ago. It’s that time of year– the time when summer time, or “Daylight Saving Time” as we for some reason call it...
Stump 360 Questions, 2015
The Atomic Birdhouse12 Aug 2016
Here’s the list of questions asked at Stump 360 in 2015. If you’re not familiar with Stump 360, see my other post that describes it more fully In general, Stump 360 questions can cover - Anything...
Stump 360 III: The Search for Stump
The Atomic Birdhouse12 Aug 2016
Later this month I’m hosting Stump 360 III: The Search for Stump, the third annual Stump 360. It’s part of 360iDev in Denver. It’s on August 23, 4:45pm - 6:00pm.
Using Stack Views in Table Cells
The Atomic Birdhouse4 Aug 2016
One of the cool things UIStackView can do for you is make it easy to dynamically update your app’s user interface while it’s running, with smooth animations and not a lot of code.