Category Archives: Development

Good environment variable values during iPhone development

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Directly from GHUnit, a small note about which environment variables to set while developing for the iPhone.

Environment Variable:                 Default:  Set to:
NSDebugEnabled                           NO       YES
NSZombieEnabled                          NO       YES
NSDeallocateZombies                      NO       NO (or YES)
NSHangOnUncaughtException                NO       YES
NSAutoreleaseFreedObjectCheckEnabled     NO       YES

Actually, I keep forgetting them, so I hope this will be useful to me.

Here an example that shows how to set those environment variables.

Setting iPhone development variables in XCode

Rails ans SQLite3 on Ubuntu

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To configure a Rails application in order to use SQLite3 please follow the following steps:

sudo apt-get install  sqlite3 swig libsqlite3-ruby libsqlite3-dev
 sudo gem install sqlite3-ruby

Then create a Rails application as usual and update the environment.rb file in the following way

Rails::Initializer.run do |config|
...
config.gem 'sqlite3-ruby', :lib => "sqlite3"
...
end

Get rid of folder that should not be versioned

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If you work with subversion, for sure you had the problem to tell to subversion to ignore a folder inside your working copy. This happens for example if your IDE builds the sources in a folder inside your working copy. From the very first commit you’ll start noticing that subversion wants to add that “build” folder to your repository. But, obviously, this is not a good practice.

So you can tell subversion to ignore a folder. Just move in the folder that contains the folder you want to be ignored by subversion and type the following command.

svn propset svn:ignore <dir_you_want_to_be_ignored> .

The “dot” at the end is important! It means you’re specifying which folders of the current folder you want to be ignored.

Please note that <dir_you_want_to_be_ignored> should be written without trailing slashes. So for example if you want the build directory not to be managed by subversion, type…

svn propset svn:ignore build .

And not…

svn propset svn:ignore build/ .

This is a quick tip. I always forget how to do it, so I wrote that little note.

Chosing the number of decimal digits when printing a number with iPhone

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This is a small snippet, useful whenever you want to convert a floating point number in a string with a fixed number of decimal digits.

NSNumberFormatter *format = [NSNumberFormatter new];
 [format setMaximumFractionDigits:1];
 NSNumber *aNumber = [[NSNumber alloc ] initWithDouble:54.4235264];
 NSString label = [[NSString alloc] initWithFormat:@"The number is %@", [format stringForObjectValue:aNumber]];
 [distance release];
 [format release];

Obviously the NSNumberFormatter class offers plenty of other method you can use to customize the way your numbers should be rendered.