Hello All,

Just a little bit of business this week and then on to some thoughts for the week. This week’s post is inspired by correspondence I’ve had with Denny, one of the subscribers to this list. It’s the basics of using gestures in your own applications, where I’ll cover taps, pinches and rotations. 

I also had a lot of problems with Xcode this week. First the beta iOS on my phone won’t work with the non beta Xcode I was using. Then the latest beta wouldn’t work. Kept getting a cryptic error message in the build. Turns out that a lot of fatal errors that have cryptic error messages when using devices occur due to corrupted or invalid provisioning profiles. Took me till Friday to clear the problem and get real work done this week.

I’ve gotten a lot of ideas from people writing me this week for posts. Someone from Twitter wants me to follow up my notification posts with one on Notification actions, which will be next week.

Updating Frames in Autolayout

For those of you about to tear your hair out about auto layout, Apple made a change that makes me want to scream. They changed where Update Frames is, deleting the original selections in the resolver. You’ll find it as an icon next to the left of the stack view icon.



Why they had to delete it from the resolver, I have no idea. What it means is  I have another round of revisions to Practical auto layout to do that I don’t have time for. I’ll have an errata in the website about it shortly.

Thoughts for the Week

I’ll end the post this week with some more thoughts. Due to some letters I received last week, and a movie I saw over the weekend, I want to relate some memories from a long time ago. When I was in college I spend a mini-semester touring the Soviet Union for a very cold, dark December, but one that was very enlightening. I had some interesting adventures like getting interrogated by the KGB if I had any contraband. Besides being patted down and having them try to see if I had a false compartment in my boots nothing else exciting happened.  Then there was tour bus leaving without me and my roommate at the Moscow Circus. We made it back to our hotel using the Moscow metro with no problem. But that’s not the two memories I remember most. I had an idea that started jelling a few days into the trip, and kept getting stronger as the  trip continued. As foreign nationals we were  almost always escorted everywhere by the Soviet tourist agency Intourist and of course given the party line about everything. I stopped counting the times our guide mentioned that Russia got invaded by some other nation — until I saw the bullet holes in Leningrad, now St Petersburg. Bullet holes were in buildings everywhere, from when the Nazis tried to capture the city. There were still bombed out buildings in the outskirts of the city from World War Two. On the plane home, after my second best memory of that trip (I’ll talk about that next week) I formulated my trip in a very simple idea.  There’s people who risk and people who want to be safe. As a large social unit, the People of the Soviet Union, and I suspect still much of Russia today, want to be safe more than anything else. On the other hand,  there are those who want to risk to become better, are willing to work hard, and willing to get very uncomfortable just to grow and succeed. In 1986, I believed that was what forged the United States and made it great. The U.S.  with two exceptions is an immigrant nation. People risked everything to come to America. These people worked hard and innovated hard to succeed, and the incredible growth of the U.S. Has that in its DNA.  That was my idea at the time. It gave me great framework to understand the true cultural clash of the USA and the USSR, why we both spent so much money pointing missiles at each other during the Cold War. One wanted to be safe,