Rediscovered Talks, Part 1: Networking the Early iOS World
I’ve been digging through old files lately—stuff in dropbox and on old hard drives—and realised I’d done quite a few presentations in the past for which there’s just about nothing available online. Here’s a couple that deal with iOS 4 and 5 APIs. I worked a lot with networking and data handling at this time, so I’d run into all the bad situations head-on and had to work out solutions on my own, and I’d get to talk about that sometimes.
FITC Mobile 2010 — Optimised networking and data handling in iOS 4
In September 2010 I got to speak at FITC Mobile about networking and concurrency. My talk focused properly asynchronous network coding, the Foundation and CoreFoundation networking APIs, and streaming large data requests, focusing on a case study of the Outpost app and how it could reasonably handle 120MB XML responses on the original iPhone. I also went into some detail about the then-new Grand Central Dispatch APIs, and how to determine network availability properly.
Toronto CocoaHeads — File coordination in practice
Around the same period I presented an evening talk at the Toronto CocoaHeads meetup, walking through the File Coordination APIs, and how to manage simultaneous file accessacross multiple threads and processes. These were new APIs, and I’d been investigating them for my book on Objective-C and had learned a lot. The deck goes into detail on why the API exists, and how it solves all these problems, before closing with a discussion of how to use it to implement sanitized iCloud document handling.
Pulling these out reminded me how much fun that era of iPhone and iPad development really was. If you end up reading through them, let me know what else you’d like me to unearth—I’ve got a lot more archives to go.