Paddleboarding & SUK /  by Paulo Fierro

Recently Niqui and I have become addicted to paddleboarding. We've started doing paddlefit with the guys from Waterman and renting boards in the weekend to go paddle around Seven Mile Beach. This is especially beautiful at sunset.

A week ago we made the jump and picked up a cheap deal on a second hand board on eCayTrade which we've been sharing.

This resulted in us doing what we call a "paddle run". Start at Governor's Beach and one runs the 2.5km down to Royal Palms while the other paddles. Then we switch and head back. Good fun, but the runner always wins.

Being summer and there not really being much wind I was intrigued when I saw this video on how to SUK:

Tried it out yesterday but it didn't really work out, there simply wasn't enough wind. I also fear the my kite is too small (12m) and/or the SUP is too big (10' x 29" x 4.5") but I intend to giving it another bash. 

Playing sound through two displays /  by Paulo Fierro

On my desk sits a 21" iMac which is plugged into a 27" Apple Cinema Display. The iMac is a great machine, but the audio quality is better coming out of the Cinema Display — larger screen, probably better speakers.

​My desk on May 17

So when I'm playing music I always select the sound output to come from the Cinema Display. You can Option+click the Volume icon on the menu bar and select either "Display Audio" or "LED Cinema Display", both mean the same thing. If I want to use the iMac speakers I select "Internal Speakers".

But what if I want to use both? Madness right? After looking around I found that you can create a "Multi-Output" device using the Audio MIDI Setup app.

So after doing that I created a multi-output device called "Both Screens" with output going to the built-in iMac speakers as well as the Cinema Display.

The only downside is that you have to control the volume from the app doing the playback, e.g. iTunes. Whatever volume you had the selected display at is what's used so you may want to swap back to it, set the right volume and then swap back.

Dual monitor sound output. Hell yes.

From the "why did I take so long to try that" department /  by Paulo Fierro

CocoaPods

I'm really glad I took the time to learn and use CocoaPods on this latest project. Such a massive time saver for iOS devs. No more adding linker flags, copying bundles and keeping external frameworks up-to-date manually.

I simply write a Podfile (similar to a Gemfile if you come from the Ruby world), and run "pod install." If a library I'm using has been updated I run "pod update". If a library I want to use isn't available, you can easily submit it to their list of specs on Github.

Great stuff.

Spark Inspector

Its like a Web Inspector for iOS apps. Modify your UI's properties and see the changes live in the Simulator or on your iOS device. you can also see your views in a 3D extruded mode to get a better grasp over how your UI is being laid out.

There's also a notification monitor to see notifications and their payloads as they are fired with the added ability to go back and resend them. Not used this much yet but it looks snazzy.

Crashlytics

I like TestFlight for distributing builds though I will be using Hockey on our next internal app because I've heard great things.

However I no longer ship the TestFlight SDK in our apps because I find the crash monitoring in Crashlytics to be far superior. You can group similar crashes and mark them closed once you've fixed the issue. You also get so many more useful details like available disk space, how many users are affected, etc so I would recommend you give it a shot. I'm a fan.

We're in the business of building things that makes our lives easier and these tools make the development easier.