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It's been a quiet few months on Developing in the Dark. I've found myself consumed in iOS development both at work and in any spare time I can find (which is never as easy to find as you'd like it to be). A recent project at work, Nightvibes, required the development of an iPhone app to bring the location-based, social planning app to the mobile. The app has thrown me in the deep end of iOS development, but has given me the chance to grapple with a bunch of development patterns, Objective C and iOS SDK, third party libraries, and all the mysterious iOS quirks that push your sanity to the edge.

Early on I had to implement a drop down calendar with a similar look and feel as the native calendar app. There appears to be two major, actively maintained implementations on Github: Kal and Tapku Library - I went with Tapku, however Kal could possibly be just as good or even better (let me know if it is). Tapku is super easy to integrate and offers a bunch of UI components including Coverflow, Progress Bars, Graphs, and importantly in this instance - a Calendar... read more

In between the busyness of moving office, bug fixing Nightvibes and doing some dev on our new company website. I was fortunate enough to spend some time in the past few weeks on a cool upcoming project we have going on at Inlight that had an interesting challenge. A key part of the project required a... read more

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It's been nearly two months since I first posted about getting started with Google App Engine. The post discussed web services and the ways in which parts of your application can be outsourced to larger, more scalable platforms - with a specific focus on Google App Engine (GAE). At... read more

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The CakePHP community has just recently begun actively pushing out version 1.3-beta (download here) of the framework. It is of course still in beta and version 1.2.5 is considered the stable release, however I've been hearing mostly success stories from people making the upgrade,... read more

This post is the first of a series of small CakePHP tips and snippets that I'd like to share with fellow CakePHP developers reading this blog. Having been developing in CakePHP for almost a year now, I've found (as I'm sure you have too) that there are very few days that go by without discovering... read more

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Recently at work we've been researching ways to improve the performance and flexibility of our web apps. We've begun trending towards outsourcing CPU intensive tasks and storage to bigger players such as Amazon and Google, basically to ensure that our web server is doing exactly (and only)... read more

Yesterday was a great day (surprising, I know, for a Monday), but as the end of a successful year at work draws closer I was very generously given a shiny new 27inch iMac as my new "workhorse". I'm currently spending my time setting it up and tuning it so it purrs like the leopard it is, however at same time I thought... read more

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Since I've now entered the the world of blogging I wanted to start off proactively in what I've heard is a continuous fight against comment spam. With only one a handful of comments so far, its not out of urgency that I've put in safeguards, but simply out of curiosity. If I wasn't in the field of web... read more

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I'm a big fan of Snipplr. It's an online code snippet storage/sharing service (similar to DZone Snippets or Snipt). Often when I'm writing code and I hit a wall I find myself traveling towards Snipplr, bypassing my usual Google search. I enjoy the succinctness of reading a code snippet as opposed to... read more

After months of being in that deadly ~80% complete stage, I've finally pulled together the last ~20% needed just to get this site live. Here it is. Welcome to Developing In The Dark!

I love new technologies and they seem to sprout up everyday - most notably when doing the breakfast twitter check. Its the thrill of... read more