Category Archives: Code

the hows.

Handling Empty Lists with Realm’s Property Wrappers

Posted on December 23, 2021 by Joel Kin

At work we recently updated from a pretty old version of Realm (10.8) to a pretty new version (10.20). Despite being just a point release, there have been some significant changes. I was very excited that the library is taking … Continue reading →

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User Language Preferences

Posted on November 29, 2021 by Joel Kin

Here’s a quick one. Google has a neat library for (among lots of other things) on-device translation, called ML Kit. I’m trying to implement it for a hackathon. Turns out (no surprise?) it’s written in Objective-C, and doesn’t really have … Continue reading →

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Recursive Property Observation in Swift

Posted on April 5, 2018 by Joel Kin

Over the last couple of years, I’ve been writing almost exclusively Swift. It’s been quite a roller coaster. I still don’t feel as though I’m an expert in the language, but I am getting to the point where I quickly … Continue reading →

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Jot

Posted on April 2, 2018 by Joel Kin

Hi folks. Joel here. It’s been a while since this blog has been up to much, hasn’t it? Well, after a lot of privately-owned work about which I was not meant to blog, I’ve got something I can talk publicly … Continue reading →

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SMSquashView

Posted on July 2, 2013 by Joel Kin

Why Now? Why Me? Lately we’ve been hearing a lot about adding personality and interest to apps with subtle animation, rather than with complex textures. As an animation guy from old times*, I couldn’t be happier about this new focus … Continue reading →

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Integrating Asana and Git

Posted on January 28, 2013 by Joel Kin

Recently we at Spaceman Labs have been testing out different tools and workflows to manage our various projects. After trying a few different packages, we’ve more or less settled on Asana as our issue tracking solution. It’s got a lot of advantages: … Continue reading →

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SMPageControl: UIPageControl’s Fancy One-Upping Cousin

Posted on October 15, 2012 by Jerry Jones

If you’ve ever spent any time at Dribbble, you know how much designers love to customize UIPageControl, normally in the form of custom spacing or fancy inset looking page dots. As a developer, you’re probably also keenly aware of the … Continue reading →

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SMShadowedLayer

Posted on March 16, 2012 by Joel Kin

Impetus For a recent project, we needed to “simulate” or “fake” the look of pieces of paper in a physical environment. We didn’t need fancy physical modeling or curves and curls and folds, just perspective and shadowing during an animation. … Continue reading →

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Countries of the World in an NSArray

Posted on March 6, 2012 by Joel Kin

Continuing our popular series of lists we’ve typed in so you don’t have to (although this one is thanks to sed). Caveats: scraped from a random source on the internet; may not be accurate; provided for entertainment/lorem ipsum purposes only. … Continue reading →

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Cancel dispatch_after

Posted on December 12, 2011 by Jerry Jones

Joel and I have been working on a project recently that relies pretty heavily on the delayed execution of blocks. It became evident pretty quickly that we needed a way to cancel these blocks. We worked around the problem in … Continue reading →

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