Mark Struzinski

---

I started using Kiwi to drive unit tests on my most recent project. Kiwi is an excellent BDD (Behavior Driven Development) framework that helps drive your code design by making test expectations very clear. It greatly increases the readability of your unit tests.

---

When I am rapidly prototyping new features, I frequently need to blow out the entire app structure from the simulator and start fresh.

To do this manually, I would follow the following steps.

From Simulator (when simulator is open)*: 1. Go to Menu Bar 2. Click iOS Simulator 3. Click Reset Content and Settings

---

This is a follow up to my previous post on persisting PList data to disk as a form of transient storage for data. This second part will just show an easy way to pull that data from disk and get it into memory in an easily usable format.

All of our Plists are stored as dictionaries. The keys for the dictionaries are stored as constants in a code file (Constants.h/.m). This allows for compile time checking and keeps us from having to litter our code with magic strings when trying to access the values.

---

Recently, we had the need to save some simple transient data to disk. For data of any significant size, we would have looked at Core Data for our persistence. In this case, we decided to use the PList format to save data to disk and pull it back off. We went through several ideas to store this data.

Some of the ideas we considered for persistence included:

• Core Data
• JSON saved in a flat file format
• PList saved directly to disk from a Cocoa object such as an NSArray or NSDictionary

---

I didn’t become an Apple user until a few years ago. I came to the platform out of curiosity. I bought myself a Macbook to start teaching myself how to code iOS apps. I quickly found myself amazed at the ingenuity and simplicity of the entire platform. It was the way everything tied together, and always seemed to work in the way you expected. The more I lived in the Apple world, the more impressed I became. In 3 years, I have gone from using Apple’s products as a hobby to a full time developer on their platform. For the first time in my life, I have questioned that someone actually pays me to work on this stuff. I guess if you ask yourself that question, you are doing the right thing with your life.