So, in what seems to be some sort of tradition, it has been yet another year since I last updated this blog. A lot has happened in that time. First and foremost, I graduated from Oakland University with a degree in computer science at the end of June, concluding the nearly two years I spent there. During September I flew out to California twice to interview with three different teams at Apple for four different positions. It was an amazing experience but unfortunately they all replied that I “wasn’t a fit”. So my job search resumed and at the end of October I finally found Detroit Labs through their ad on StackOverflow jobs. After going through their rather informal yet thorough cultural and technical interviews, they decided to hire me for a three month contract-to-hire to see how I fit in there. So far I think it has been going great. We’re about to ship the project I’ve been working on and hopefully in another month they’ll hire me on as a full employee. I’ve learned quite a bit about iOS programming and especially test and behavior driven development. CocoaPods and Kiwi have been real eye openers into the worlds of dependency management and behavioral testing. Especially interesting is Kiwi’s ability to dynamically mock classes and methods for particular tests, making it easy to mock only the things you need. It’s nothing like the simple JUnit testing I did at school or the XCTest testing I’ve been trying on my own.
Speaking of on my own, here’s an update on my current projects.
HazeLight: HazeLight is a CloudFlare client application for iOS. It’s in early development, as I started it during the time I was looking for a job. With my current project at work wrapping up I should have some free time on the weekends to work on it. It’s a learning project, so it’ll be slow going, but I’ll be adding Kiwi tests in addition to the XCTest tests I already have. It will have a very simple UI until it’s functionally complete, at which time I may spruce it up. It’s fully open source, so I’ll be tracking issues on the GitHub page. Hopefully I can release it before iOS 8 is announced.
CoRD: My CoRD fork is effectively dead as I have neither the time nor inclination to continue work on it. Since I no longer have to interact with Windows servers on a daily basis my motivation for this project has been eliminated. While CoRD itself is rather stagnate, FreeRDP continues to progress, though its Mac integration isn’t yet to the point where is can easily be integrated into a Mac project. If you’re looking for an OS X RDP client that integrates FreeRDP, RoyalTSX may be your answer. While it is a commercial product (~$37), it is far more than just an RDP client. I’ve never used it but it certainly looks like what I would want if I still needed one. And it’s where I would have taken the CoRD UI, had I needed it that long.