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###Status At the start of this year (2015) I decided that I was going to make at least one new blog post a month. The focus would be on less-documented aspects of the iOS and OS X development world. So far this seems to have been a huge success! I've been in a couple different blogs, and what I've written seems to be helping a lot of people.
###New Features A few months ago I started to add tags to my pages that allow for auto-discovery of the RSS feed of this blog, which you can also find on the blog index.
This month I added two new features, Q&A and offline blog posts.
Q&A
I try to attend conferences and meet-ups to share knowledge and help teach. I also get a lot of email of questions relating to things I've posted or talked about. A lot of these conversations happen offline or in such a way that makes documenting them difficult. In my experience a lot of information that is gleamed in passing turns out to be extermely vital in debugging an issue later on. So I decided to create a github repo that is dedicated to being able to ask questions related to content I post on this blog (or content you would like to see posted here).
https://github.com/samdmarshall/QandA
Offline Posts
When I overhauled this site a couple of years ago I switched away from writing everything in HTML over to using Markdown instead. I write everything in Markdown, and run a script to find updated files, which will pass them through pandoc, which converts the Markdown to HTML and then will upload them here. For a while I've been wanting to provide these in a form that can be read and used offline. Last week I wrote a small tool that has now become part of the script that updates my website. Now, in addition to the HTML versions of these blog posts you will be able to find links to the single-page PDF versions that can be downloaded and read offline (I really wanted to avoid pagination and dealing with how to appropriately break up content so for now they are single-page documents). The PDF links are listed next to the post name on the blog index.
###Planned Posts Right now there are two new posts in the works. Unfortunately, I don't think I will be able to get one of them up before September. However I wanted to at least make a post to given an idea as to what is coming soon, and why there is a delay:
Both of these posts are based on observed behavior in the beta versions of Xcode. Most of what I can know is set in stone is currently written, I do have a lot of notes about behaviors that may still be subject to change. Until the release of Xcode 7 (hopefully soon after the September 9th event) I don't feel comfortable publishing anything that I'm not confident is going to be accurate to the final product.
Xcode Server
Lately I've been doing a lot of work with the new version of Xcode Server and continuous integration bots. I really like them, and while some things are a bit of a pain, this has been a breath of fresh air compared to managing a jenkins instance. A number of people have expressed some interest in seeing more details about that. I am going to talk about my experiences with how management and setup has been. Additionally I will try to include some odd quirks and tricks I've had to do getting everything to play nice.
Third Party Platforms & Toolchains
I also had a request to talk about creating platforms and supporting other toolchains in Xcode. This post is almost finished, and is going to be very similar to the post I made about SDKs. It will talk about structure and how to register new bundles and tools with Xcode's build system and getting those to display inside of the GUI editor and usable with the CLI tools. This is an interesting area as parts of this are based on existing behaviors (multiple toolchains), as well as new ones (multiple platforms).