Vikram Rao

iCloud CoreData sync does not work as expected, has always caused issues and the objective was never satisfactorily achieved. By deprecating related symbols, is Apple hinting at end of the road for iCloud CoreData sync? In this article, I'm looking at the current status and future for Core Data over iCloud for automatic sync between devices.

Let us look briefly about what is MarkoJS and why it is needed. MarkoJS site says it is a "A high performance templating engine and UI component building library". Its competition consists of Moustache and HandlebarsJS. This post gives a overview of Marko Widgets, some missing information on MarkoJS site about the way it works with code samples.

Are you upgrading php on OSX? Why? I have encountered a memory leak in regular expression api in php 5.5.31 (strange!) and I'm attempting to upgrade to 5.6.20. Your reasons could be different - just to be up-to-date or experiment with a newer version. This post briefly describes certain workarounds for issues, at the time of this writing, while installing php using HomeBrew on OSX El Capitan.

iOS has soft keyboard and it covers the screen by overlaying on it when it comes up for text input. If the input receiving UI element like UITextField or UITextView is in the bottom half of the screen, it would be hidden by the keyboard and the text entered cannot be seen. So it is desirable to scroll the content up so that the focussed textfield becomes visible and hence the content entered too. There can be a case when the content hidden might not be an input field (might be a label or a button) and it might be desirable to access them via scroll. Below, I have illustrated an easier and cleaner way to achieve this when using story board and auto layout.

HTTPS stands for http over SSL/TLS. It is the normal http protocol but where the transport layer uses SSL/TLS (here in after called simply SSL) encryption to provide necessary security to the conversation. How does https benefit us? How does it make our internet surfing and transactions more secure? A brief post here that tries to transcend all the areas of HTTPS protocol briefly with pictorial explanation.

S/MIME or Secure/Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions is a mechanism to communicate over email securely without the email being intercepted and read or modified by anyone not intended to receive it. It is supported by all modern email desktop and mobile clients including Apple Mail on OSX and iOS and Microsoft Outlook on both OSX and Windows. Better still Microsoft exchange server supports setting up certificates in its directory server so that clients can automatically discover and enable SMIME without any hassle. More about SMIME working and setup in this post.

OSX Server App brings lot of services to our hands and one feature that I'm interested in is the easy to setup source code repo server similar to bitbucket or github. This post gives an overview of setting up one.

Xcode Bot provides a mechanism to integrate code continuously as it is checked-in into source repository which is polled by the bot at set intervals. It is very similar to Jenkins except that it is from Apple and works seamlessly with Apple development tools. This post gives an overview of setting up one locally.

What are the choices when hosting a web application or web service? Which is more reliable? And which is cost effective? What are the scalability options? How flexible are the options to scale up and down based on required computing needs either for some irregular tasks or change in traffic patterns? Click 'more' to read on...

Using css, how to create a text fade out effect when it overflows. I often encounter this issue where I have to clip text when it exceeds a div boundary with an option to read full text via a 'more' link. This post suggests a way to achieve it.

I have been coding in javascript intensively for a year now and here are some of the patterns that I have begun to internalise - avoiding conflicts in global namespace, currying, object orientation etc.

I have a white Apple Macbook 13inch (mid-2006). While it has served me well for last 7 years brilliantly for my development needs, surfing, email and occasional gaming, off late I have started using Adobe tools like photoshop and illustrator and it gets sluggish when I open my usual apps and then I open a heavy Adobe Illustrator file. What is the bottleneck in my apple macbook that is causing sluggishness and how to address it?