On The Main Thread

My name is Justin Driscoll. I write about software development as well as my favorite tools, toys and other technology that I find interesting.

Publishing

This site is made up of static pages generated by Jekyll. Those pages are then uploaded to Amazon S3 using S3cmd and Transmit. The CSS is Compass. The posts are written in Markdown. The feed is, well... RSS.

Contact

The best way to reach me with questions or comments is on Twitter @jdriscoll.

Thank you for reading.

Latest Articles

Core Data in Swift Part 1 - The Stack

While updating a new Core Data app to Swift 2 I've found a few situations where either there doesn't seem to be any official guidance on best practices, or worse, what I'd consider bad recommendations.

How to Check if You're Running on the Simulator in Swift

I spend a lot of my time developing iOS apps that work with our web applications. When I run the app in the simulator I want it to talk to the copy of that web application that's running on my development machine and when I run it on a device (or issue a beta build) it should talk to the staging server. Unfortunately, This isn't as simple in Swift as it is in Objective C.

Trim a String in Swift

I needed to trim whitespace from some user input in a Swift app I'm working on. I could have used the ability to bridge to NSString and called `stringByTrimmingCharactersInSet:` but doing it in Swift seemed like a fun little exercise.

Simple Auto Layout in Swift

I haven't had much time to spend with Swift lately but with the release of Swift 1.2 it seemed like a good time to refresh my memory. I have one (very unfinished) project written entirely in Swift that helps me keep track of the changes in the language. This project has come to the point where I can no longer rely on storyboards and nibs for layout so the time had come to look seriously at writing Auto Layout code in Swift.

Free as in Baby

I've been meaning to write this post but Daniel Compton beat me to it. "It takes a village to raise a library" and "free as in 'baby'" are too perfect not to repeat.