ObjectiveSee | Oliver Drobnik

Oliver Drobnik blogs about his iOS Development experiences on cocoanetics.com, and everything that is too short to be blogged he tweets as @Cocoanetics. He is a full time iOS developer and best know for his Open Source DTCoreText which allows to build rich text views fed with HTML without using UIWebView. He developed and owns the iCatalog.framework which is used by dozens of brands to bring their paper catalogs to the iPad. Oliver also has a weekly podcast specifically targeted at iOS developers, the Cocoanetics Podcast.

What is your computer and workspace setup while developing?

I am working in a 2-person office on a 27“ iMac. When I’m not in my office I have a 2010 MacBook AIR (11”). My code is synched, stored and backed up via Subversion (non-public code and components) and Git (Open Source code). Because of this I am flexible where I get my coding and writing done.

What are your favourite Apple iOS API's to use within apps you develop?

CoreText obviously. ;-)

What is some software that you use outside of Xcode for development?

I developed the localization tool Linguan (available on Mac App Store) to conveniently scan for and edit your localized string files. I use Lion’s built-in screenshot feature extensively. Apart from this I drive most of the interactions with source code repositories (Git, Subversion) from the command line, does that count as “some software”?

What do you do to stay up to date on new iOS features, frameworks and SDK's?

I follow most opinion leaders and “celebrities” in the iOS development space on Twitter. If something important happens then several people are going to mention this. So even if I don’t watch Twitter all the time, I will still notice. I am also following several podcasts which are kind of interesting for developers, mostly discussion talk shows.*

From a developers perspective, what are your hopes for the next major iOS update?

I am hoping that Apple will add the missing UITextInput methods and native support for text selection. With these we could finally create our custom rich text editing components. That’s the minimum. Better yet they would make the current APIs for text editing and rich text (which are based on WebKit) public - preferably in a cleaned up and well-documented manner.

Finally, what is your favourite app?