Me and Mark Publishing

If you’re using Game Center in a SpriteKit game, you present Game Center view controllers to show things like leaderboards and achievements.

People frequently ask on Mac development forums how to use C++ in Xcode.

Authenticating the local player for Game Center in a SpriteKit game requires two steps.

I recently migrated to a new Mac.

I reached a point in developing LetterMiner where I wanted to save the game when the player quit so they could pick up where they left off.

In this article I cover the Time Profiler instrument and how to find slow spots in your code with it.

I couldn’t cover everything about Instruments in my Getting Started with Instruments article.

A dSYM file contains your project’s debugging symbols.

Instruments is a performance measurement tool that ships with Xcode.

I learned about this tip from an Apple engineer on Apple’s developer forums and felt like sharing it here.

Apple added the SKCameraNode class to SpriteKit in iOS 9 and OS X 10.11 to make it easier to scroll and zoom in SpriteKit scenes.

I had a problem with a text view that would not scroll vertically.

A common complaint from people interested in iOS development was having to pay the $99 annual fee to Apple just to put an app they created on their own iOS device.

You can no longer take snapshots of your projects in Xcode 7.

When developing Mac and iOS applications, the recommended approach to support older operating systems is to use the most recent SDK and set the deployment target to the earliest operating system your application supports.

I struggled with how to pass data between view controllers in a Mac storyboard show segue so I’m detailing how I solved the problem here.

GitHub and Bitbucket are two of the most popular sites for storing git repositories online.

A new feature of Instruments in Xcode 7 is the ability to compare two call trees in the Time Profiler instrument.

Xcode 7 adds Address Sanitizer.

In the version of Instruments that comes with Xcode 7, Apple removed the menu items to set inspection ranges that were in the View menu in Instruments 6.

A change in Xcode’s project editor UI I didn’t see in the Xcode 7 betas that I see in the release version is the target list on the left side of the editor is hidden.

One of Xcode 7’s new features is measuring your application’s code coverage when running your unit tests.

I covered this topic in the Xcode 4: Finding the Application You Built post, but I’ve answered this question twice online this week so I’m writing about it again.

One of Xcode 7’s new features is measuring your project’s code coverage when running unit tests.

I updated my document-based Cocoa application to Swift 2 in Xcode 7 using Xcode’s converter.

A new feature added in Xcode 7 to simplify unit testing is the @testable import statement.

Xcode 6 simplifies copying third-party frameworks to your application bundle.

Previous versions of Xcode placed all of the refactoring tools in a Refactor submenu, which you could access by choosing Edit > Refactor.

A common pattern in Mac application development is to create a menu item, create an IBAction for that item in one of your classes, and connect the menu item to the IBAction.

I’ve seen this question asked multiple times on Stack Overflow.

In Xcode 6 Instruments no longer has toolbar buttons to set inspection ranges.

In my previous post, I detailed the steps needed to bind a view-based table view to a Core Data entity.

My main reason for writing this post is to have a reference for myself in case I need to bind a view-based table in the future.

In Xcode 4 and 5 you could test your user interface in Interface Builder by choosing Editor > Simulate Document.

Instruments is the developer tool that has the most user interface changes in Xcode 6.

I struggled briefly with overriding NSDocument’s initWithType: method in Swift so I’m sharing my code.

Xcode 6 is now available to download from the Mac App Store.

With the recent release of Xcode 6.0, some of you may be wondering if you can have both Xcode 5 and 6 installed on your Mac.

In Swift you would use the following for statement to go through each element in an array when you need to access the current index inside the for loop: for index in 0..

This article shows you how to get started unit testing Swift code in Xcode with XCTest.

Swift is hot now.

Recently I’ve seen a lot of questions on Stack Overflow from people having problems getting their applications to run on earlier versions of OS X and iOS.

This post summarizes what I learned when I wrote some code to load a PDF preview window from an external nib file.

I missed a new feature in Xcode 5’s debugger: Quick Look support to display variables.

Having answered multiple questions on Stack Overflow from people getting errors when they change their Xcode project’s deployment target to OS X 10.6, it seems time to explain the cause of these errors: base internationalization.

One change to the Allocations instrument in Instruments 5, which comes with Xcode 5, is that the allocation summary lists the heap allocations and the amount of anonymous VM, which you can see in the following screenshot: Should you focus on the Live Bytes

A common problem for people using Xcode to write command-line C and C++ programs is not being able to read files.

I was recently working on some code that previews a PDF file.

Xcode 5 provides additional ways for you to customize where Xcode places its derived data, such as the application you’re building.

When learning a programming language, you generally start by writing command-line programs so you can focus on learning the language.