ASIHTTP is "dead", long live to it!
I used ASIHTTP in a couple of projects of mine, and always found it was very useful. Unfortunately, its creator and maintainer decided to end its involvement with the project, due to a bunch of reasons that you can read about in his own post. It’s sad anyway reading about “vitriol” being poured upon anyone who simply gave away his code for free to whom could need it.
Let’s say straight that we will miss ASIHTTP, as it is suggested by the large adoption rate it enjoyed. For me, besides sparing me a few headaches, it was even worth a handful of up-votes for an answer I gave on StackOverflow about its merits and advantages vs. NSURLRequest/NSURLConnection.
But life goes on. I am not currently involved in any project requiring web connections right now, but I have started looking into AFNetworking, which looks pretty promising. We’ll see if it ever grows up to ASIHTTP level of efficiency and features.
To Ben, ASIHTTP’s creator: keep up the good job!
Lock-free programming
Lock-free programming is often considered an easy alternative to blocking for handling parallelism. This article offers a very nice introduction to the topic, and it also shows that it is not easy at all! In any case, it makes for an interesting read.
Boundary value analysis for bug fixing
Anyone who has worked in quality assurance or is serious about testing knows about a technique used to define test cases that is called boundary value analysis. Here is how Wikipedia describes it:
User Experience @ CES
Among the many reports from CES 2012, this one is really interesting to me because it focuses on User Experience. Indeed, how boring all the hype around device specs when really all that matters is the experience that device grants you! But this is just a reminder of how difficult it is changing mindset, forgetting about details no one really cares about, and focusing on those details that really provide a benefit in terms of user experience and usability.
What's behind iPhone success
If you read this interesting analysis (via Daring Fireball) by former Windows Phone manager Microsoft’s Charlie Kindel about the status of Android and the relevance of fragmentation in its future, it is easy to understand that a critical role in iOS initial acceptance, then its ubiquitous success, was played by the deal that Apple stroke with carriers worldwide.