I've recently started using Git to deploy to my servers. Anyone who has used Heroku would be familiar with this technique and it feels kinda cool to be able to think of your different environments as just git remotes. I can't vouch for the appropriateness of this technique in the general case, but I just wanted to make a note on what I've found to work for me. Hopefully, others may find this useful.

Previously I had created an Xcode plugin for Hudson to allow you to configure and invoke builds directly. Although this worked for some cases, there are a few projects where the build process is more complex or non-standard enough to force me back to scripting things manually. Rather than update the plugin to try and cope with every esoteric use case, I decided to flip things around and simple create a ruby-wrapper for Xcode. This allows me to take what i need and create custom Rakefiles to control the build process.

Blocks in Objective-C have been a life-saver and allowed our code to become terser and more understandable. Although some of the main parts of the iOS SDK have block-based alternatives (animations, etc), KVO is still based on defining a method with a well-known signature in your observer (not even defined by a @protocol and doesn't allow the use of arbitrary @selector). I felt there should be a way to be able to achieve this and the result is this project on github.

My AppStore apps are currently all reporting that “This item is no longer available in the App Store” or “This item is temporarily unavailable” as of couple of days ago. I have received no notification from Apple and apparently nothing wrong in iTunes connect. After a bit of googling I stumbled across this blog post where it seemed that at least one other person had experienced something similar.