I am proud to announce the release of my newest iOS App today, London Bikes.

London Bikes is a simple and easy-to-use App that helps you locate the closest Barclays Cycle Hire™ docking station. With one tap you can find the closest Barclays Cycle Hire station, how far away it is and in which direction, and how many available bikes and docks it currently has.

Find out how many available docks there are at your destination easily with the full-map mode. You can even set a ride timer to help track your Barclays Cycle Hire rental and prevent late fees.

London Bikes is a huge time saver and makes getting around London a little bit easier. Available now, for FREE.

Download London Bikes today on the iTunes App Store.

Recently, I launched an App called NYC Bikes. Because it quickly became pretty popular, I expanded on it and created another bike share app for Chicago. I then created apps for London, Washington D.C., Melbourne, and San Francisco (all currently under Apple review) with more on the way.

These apps share the same UI, 99% of the same code base, with only API endpoints, colors, strings and images swapped out. I previously wrote about my fix for using Xcode asset catalogs with multiple targets, so I thought I would also share my build number strategy for all of these bike share apps.

UAAppReviewManager is a simple and lightweight, yet powerful App review prompting tool for iOS and Mac App Store apps. It’s Appirater all grown up and ready for primetime. I just pushed out the 0.2.0 update to it that makes the basic setup possible with only 2 lines of code. Here’s how:

A few months ago, I released an App called NYC Bikes that quickly became the most popular non-official Citi Bike app. It resonates with busy New Yorkers because it takes far less time to get the same amount of information than the official app, and it actually works.

Expanding to other cities where Bike Shares exist was a no brainer. Just this last week I released the second of these bike share apps: Chicago Bikes.

The apps share the same UI, 99% of the same code base, with only API endpoints, colors, strings and images swapped out. When building the base framework that would allow me to create new apps for new cities, I found it particularly easy to use Xcode’s new image asset catalog feature. This allowed me to place all shared images in one asset catalog, and the local images in another that would only apply to that particular city, separated by targets.

Then building the apps would pull in the right assets for that target from the xcassets file that pertained to it. Unfortunately, Xcode had other plans.

I am proud to announce the release of my newest iOS App today, Chicago Bikes.

Chicago Bikes is a simple and easy-to-use App that helps you locate the closest Divvy Bike℠ docking station. With one tap you can find the closest Divvy Bike station, how far away it is and in which direction, and how many available bikes and docks it currently has.

Chicago Bikes is a huge time saver and makes getting around Chicago a little bit easier. Available now, for FREE.

Download Chicago Bikes today on the iTunes App Store.

Those of you who have known me a long time know that I had a Big Brother named Scott when I was younger. Yes, had as in past-tense, but not because any siblings died, but rather I was a “Little” in the Big Brother and Big Sisters of America program for several years.

When my parents divorced and my Mother decided move us from Canada to sunny San Diego, California, she took on the arduous task of raising 2 boys while working full time to support our family. While we had some family support in the area with my Aunt Kim close by, and Grandparents a short 2hr drive away to Palm Springs, my mother thought that I needed a positive Male role-model in my life, and she was right.

What is UAObfuscatedString?

UAObfuscatedString is a simple and lightweight category on NSString that allows you to prevent sensitive strings from appearing in your compiled binary. Without some sort of obfuscation, strings like backend API methods and urls, API keys and other sensitive data can be extracted by utilizing various command-line tools such as strings.

TLDR; Install an older version of Java, found here.

Despite every registered 3rd party developer having early access to the unreleased versions, every new Mac OS release is bound to have compatibility problems with some existing 3rd party software. My Drobo Dashboard and it’s iSCSI initiator backend software seems to consistently have problems whenever upgrading OS’s, and Mavericks was no exception.

NYC Bikes is a simple and easy-to-use App that helps you locate the closest Citi Bike℠ docking station. With one tap you can find the closest Citi Bike station, how far away it is and in which direction, and how many available bikes and docks it currently has. NYC Bikes has just been updated to version 1.2 so what’s new?

UALogger is a logging tool for iOS and Mac apps. Think of it as NSLog on steroids. It allows you to add information like the file and line number to your logs, customize when to log to the console and when not to, and allows collection of the entire recent console log for your application. It includes the UALogger class and class methods, and a few handy macros.

I just finished updating a cool feature in UALogger: Severity Level Filtering.