I picked up Nikolai Krill’s CodeRunner a while back as a sort of scratch pad for writing code snippets. With support for a variety of languages, it looked like a handy tool for banging together scripts and experiments. But I was let down a bit by one hope that didn’t pan out: a passing attempt at a kind of REPL for Objective-C. While Code Runner supports ObjC as a syntax, you can’t really use it to test your ideas against the frameworks.

I don’t know how to sugar coat this. Women get a pretty raw deal in our culture, and the more instances I get exposed to, the angrier I become. My daughter is nine years old. She’s just a few short years from boys turning from an annoyance into a actual problem. The kind of problem where being attractive and female seems to turn many men into degenerate neanderthals. The kind of neanderthal whose behaviour makes it into blog posts like these.

With the principle development work for Tiberius complete, I’m moving onto a new iOS project. I’m not sure how long it will take to develop, but it feels like a larger, more ambitious project, and I’m not even sure yet that I have the ability to do it. This is, therefore, the best kind of project. One of this project’s components involves a great deal of parsing using regular expressions. I’m working on a UIView subclass that performs syntax highlighting, and writing the correct regular expressions to match the patterns in my target text has proven to be a challenge.

In 1997, Steve Jobs returned to Apple, and among his first moves was to kill off most of its products. No more Quadras, Performas (Performae?) LCs, Newtons and OpenDocs. In the video above, from the company’s 1997 Worldwide Developers Conference, Jobs takes questions from the audience. This three-minute clip is his answer to why he killed OpenDoc. But never mind OpenDoc. His answer is about focus. And focus is about saying no.

I had the great privilege of speaking at our regular Toronto Area Cocoa and WebObjects user group meeting last night. I spoke about CouchDB: an introduction for the uninitiated, and its application for iOS developers in particular. CouchDB, and the iOS framework called TouchDB, form the networking foundation for Tiberius, ensuring that sweet sweet data seamlessly moves between a user’s various iOS devices and the web. I firmly believe in CouchDB as an enabling technology for the next generation of mobile apps that rely on a web services backend.