I put my hand up to do a talk at the February 2012 Melbourne Cocoaheads meet up on CATiledLayer. It was a great start to the year with an attendance of about 80 people at RMIT in the CBD.

My presentation was a reflection on my own experiences implementing a CATiledLayer backed UIScrollView, highlighting some of finer points of that didn’t seem immediately obvious. During the presentation I introduced the a new open source project JCTiledScrollView that hopes to be a best case implementation of a CATiledLayer backed scroll view.

It’s been a number of months and some incredibly late nights in the making but the new realestate.com.a iPad App finally went live in the App Store last Friday, August 12. I was lucky enough to be able to give a demo of the app the night before release at the August Melbourne Cocoaheads meeting to one of the largest crowds to date!

I joined the REA Group mobile team back in March 2011 to help with the continuing development of their iPhone app, and after a UI uplift release for the iPhone we started working on a universal iPad app. After some hiccups along the way, we managed to deliver a brilliant looking, stable app that I’m really proud to have worked on. I’d say it’s reset the bar for iOS property apps and is streets above the competition.

Luke Cunningham (@icaruswings) and I presented a talk at the June 2011 Cocoaheads meet up titled “Epic refactorings and patterns to make your code awesome!”.

Just a quick post to highlight some upcoming events I’m getting excited about.

If you’re reading this and attending WWDC or Swipe Conference then hit me up on Twitter and we’ll coordinate beers.

Stewart Gleadow (@StewGleadow) and I did a quick presentation at Cocoaheads this month highlighting some of our favourite (or more obscure) Xcode 4 shortcuts.

Now that we’re well into 2011 the question has to be asked: Is it still worth supporting iOS 3 users? There are a lot of cool new APIs and language features you can take advantage of in iOS 4 (blocks being one of them), most new work I’m involved with is targeted at iOS 4 and soon we’ll have iOS 5.

So, are you cutting off paying customers or future paying customers by requiring iOS 4.0 and above?

I was recently made aware of the very handy sips(1) command line tool. Sips is short for Scriptable Image Processing System; it is more or less a command line front end to some of Apple’s processing abilities.

My problem that day was How can I automatically resize my Icon.png artwork and all of a sudden with the knowledge of sips’ existence it was easy to write a small bash script to rename and resize my large 512x512 pixel artwork down to the various names and sizes required by iOS. (Thanks Mark!)

I’m presenting a talk tonight at Melbourne CocoaHeads on implementing Apple’s iAd framework. I’ll be going over how to add the iAd framework to your project, a handful of things to remember about using iAds and an overview my first hand experiences with Seoul City Metro as an iAd supported app.

I will be showing some code I have recently sourced a named JCAdSupportedNavController that provides a good way to implement iAds in a UINavigationController. You can check it out on github.

The sides for the presentation are up on slideshare

Just a heads up that I will be attending TEDx Canberra this weekend! After forgetting to signup properly to TEDx Sydney I’m looking forward to a great day!

Not long after iOS 4.0 was released I pushed a small update to Delhi City Metro to keep track of some basic (anonymous) user statistics. I’m keen to gauge the audience of any specific iOS 4 features I might consider adding and now that I’ve been able to visualise these, I thought I’d share them here.

To add a geographic angle to the iOS usage statistics you can see in the second graph that the majority of Delhi City Metro users are from India.