Month: March 2014

Now that I’ve talked about the old blogs I subscribed to back in 2010, what about the new blogs I’ve found since then?

New Blogs
Here are the blogs that, for the most part, started around or after my 2010 post, so I didn’t include them then:

Florian Kugler: iOS, Mac, and Web Development by Florian Kugler (floriankugler on Twitter). Wrote some interesting performance posts back in April-May of last year. Posting has been light recently.
iOS Unit Testing by Ron Lisle (rlisle on Twitter). Explores TDD for iOS.
The Mental Blog: Software with Intellect by Drew McCormack (drewmccormack on Twitter), author of ICACloud referenced in Edge Cases 77.
The Shape of Everything by Gus Mueller (ccgus on Twitter), author of Acorn. Gives monthly “status reports” on his life as an indie developer.
iOS Development by Ole Begemann (olebegemann on Twitter). Wrote NSProgress post referenced in Edge Cases 84.
The UI Observatory by Jochen Wolters (jochenwolters on Twitter). Interesting analysis and details of user interfaces on (mostly) OS X.

Old-Timers I Missed?
Here are the blogs that were around then, or if they weren’t, are by old-timers who were.

carpeaqua by indie developer Justin Williams (justin on Twitter), now owner of the Glassboard sharing platform. Posts frequently.
Cocoa Is My Girlfriend by Marcus Zarra and others. Terrible name, great technical posts.
Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programmers by Graham Lee (secboffin on Twitter), previously called Secure Mac Programming (the change is explained here). Unusual, unique, smart philosophical musings about development.

Aggregators
There are quite a few new resources that exist to tell you about Cocoa development articles and other resources. This is by no means an exhaustive list, nor necessarily the best, just the ones I’ve found so far.

iOS Dev Weekly weekly email newsletter by Dave Verwer (daveverwer on Twitter)
iOS Dev Tools by Adam Swinden (iOSDevTools on Twitter)
Cocoa Snippets by Guilherme Rambo (_inside on Twitter)
iOS Developer Tips by John Muchow (iOS_Dev_Tips on Twitter)

Full-Featured Articles
The next two aren’t blogs, exactly.

objc.io is a self-described “periodical about best practices and advanced techniques in Objective-C”. It is professionally written (in part by Florian Kugler, mentioned above) and well edited. You can subscribe to it.

NSHipster calls itself a “journal” and comes out every week (I believe). It is also very well written and professional, and it’s by Mattt Thompson (mattt on Twitter).

As I discuss in Edge Cases 86, these feel more to me like tutorial books than blogs, and feel in part like they’re trying to take the place of Apple’s documentation by introducing topics not as “here’s an interesting thing that I found”, but rather as “this is all you need to know about X”.

Maybe, with so many people new to the community, that’s what we need now, because Apple surely isn’t going to be putting out weekly tutorials anytime soon. But it’s going to take me a while to get used to.

Back in August of 2010, when I wrote a post about my blogroll, I wanted to update that post frequently to keep it in sync with my blogroll as it evolved….

So much for that.

But it turns out, letting it lay fallow for almost three years means that I can do a “Where Are They Now” post.

So where are they now?

Truly Dead Blogs
ChrisAshworth.org/blog, by Chris Ashworth (Chris_Ashworth on Twitter) deleted about a year ago, sort of (?) replaced by his company blog, Notes from Figure 53
ranchero.com by Brent Simmons (brentsimmons on Twitter), dead, in favor of inessential.com
Well-Placed Pixels no author listed, server not responding
iPhone & iPad UX Reviews by Suzanne Ginsburg (suzanneginsburg on Twitter), per last post, shutting down 4/2014, replaced by Touchy Talk
Sharing the truth one thread at a time no author listed, deleted by author

Slumbering Blogs, Last Updated…
3/2013 Alan Quatermain by Jim Dovey, now working at Apple (alanQuatermain on Twitter)
2011 Dave Dribin’s Blog by Dave Dribin (ddribin on Twitter)
2010 Lap Cat Software Blog by Jeff Johnson (lapcat on app.net, no longer on Twitter)
2011 Cocoa with Love by Matt Gallagher (cocoawithlove on Twitter)
6/2013 venomous porridge by Dan Wineman (dwineman on Twitter)

Transformed Blogs
iPhone Development by Jeff LaMarche (jeff_lamarche on Twitter), since 7/2013 exclusively about developing his company’s game “Turncoat”
Matt Legend Gemmell by Matt Gemmell (mattgemmell on Twitter) since 1/2014 switched from development to fiction (and non-?) writing full time
Red Sweater Blog by Daniel Jalkut (danielpunkass on Twitter), now solely a company blog, personal topics at Bitsplitting.org (which was briefly a podcast)
ignore the code by Lukas Mathis (LKM on Twitter), recent very long post on Windows Metro, signaling possible change in focus?

Surviving Categories

In-Depth Technical (new, see below for explanation)
rentzsch.tumblr.com by Jonathan “Wolf” Rentzsch (rentzsch on Twitter)
inessential.com by Brent Simmons (brentsimmons on Twitter)
NSBlog by Mike Ash (mikeash on Twitter)
ridiculous_fish by “an engineer on the AppKit team”
Hamster Emporium by Greg Parker (gparker‎ on Twitter)

Commentary
Daring Fireball by John Gruber (gruber on Twitter)
Marco.org by Marco Arment (marcoarment on Twitter)
Apple Outsider by Matt Drance (drance on Twitter)
Waffle, by Jesper, back after a two-year hiatus

Explanation!
In my original post, I had five categories, Well-Rounded, In-Depth Coding, Low-Level, Design Blogs, and Commentary.

Well-Rounded took the biggest beating, with only two blogs coming out of it completely unchanged. Both blogs, the one from my podcast cohost Jonathan “Wolf” Rentzsch and the one from the exceptionally prolific Brent Simmons, I would now put in a new In-Depth Technical category; it just seems more fitting given their primarily technical content.

One of my two In-Depth Coding blogs is also slumbering, but otherwise it and the two Low-Level blogs are intact, probably because they just keep posting at long intervals. (How would I even know if they were on hiatus?) Again, now I’m lumping them into the new In-Depth Technical category.

Design Blogs is also gone, with one blog dead, one slumbering, and one potentially transformed. That leaves the clear winner, the Commentary blogs: six out of eight are still going strong. Though, it turns out, I personally no longer subscribe to either asymco or Smoking Apples, so I’ve removed those from my list. (Perhaps they were going a little too strong for my taste?)

Even with many of the “dead” or “slumbering” blogs, their authors are still active on twitter, so I still follow them there.

Rolling Forward
Now that I’ve gotten the old blogs out of the way, my next post will talk about all the new stuff.