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Most Wanted (2014): Popular posts on the sketchyTech blog

on December 19, 2014

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By Jacob Spinks from Northamptonshire, England (starling fledgling) [CC BY 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

Over 150 blogposts were released into the wild on the sketchyTech site this year. It has been a busy time to say the least. Here's how the most successful fledglings faired.

Note: The number in parentheses is the number of page views recorded by Blogger for the post. Any post with more than 1,000 page views is recorded here, but this of course gives bias to earlier months, because more recent posts have had less time to accumulate views.

January

Enable your iOS app to share files via iTunes and to open files sent from other apps ('Open In') (1,877)

February

JSON and the JavaScriptCore Framework (Xcode/iOS) (1,559)

Collections: Dictionaries, Arrays, Lists and Maps in iOS, Windows Store apps and Android (1,515)

Changing the background colour in iOS (Xcode), Windows Store apps (Visual Studio) and Android (Eclipse) (1,241)

Important differences between UIButton, UIBarButtonItem, and UITabBarItem in iOS (Xcode) (1,061)

March

Easiest way to zip and unzip files in your iOS app (Xcode) (4,946)

Open a file in another app using a UIDocumentInteractionController (Xcode/iOS) (2,266)

NSUndoManager made simple (Xcode/iOS) (2,205)

How to change the background colour of an NSView in OS X 10.8 onwards (Xcode) (2,158)

EPUB2 to EPUB3: Lessons Learnt in Conversion (1,997)

April

SHA1 encryption in iOS (1,378)

May

UICollectionView: A super simple example (iOS/Xcode) (5,722)

Text-level semantics: italics (i), emphasis (em), bold (b) and strong (strong) in EPUB3 (1,539)

June

JSON and Xcode (iOS): The Swift Basics (4,920)

Goodbye blocks: Passing a closure to a parameter in Swift (Xcode/iOS) (2,602)

July

Swift: join() and split() explained (2,235)

Swift: Using filter() to remove items from Arrays (1,184)

Swift: Inheritance and generics in algorithms (1,184)

An A-Z of Swift Protocol Names (Xcode 6, beta 4) (1,178)

August

Swift: A pure Swift method for returning ranges of a String instance (Xcode 6 Beta 5) (5,447)

Swift: reverse(), sort() and sorted() explained (3,430)

Swift: Creating styled and attributed text with NSAttributedString and NSParagraphStyle (updated) (3,051)

Unsafe pointers in Swift: A first look (Part I, Xcode 6 Beta 6) (2,801)

Unsafe pointers in Swift: Conversion to and from a COpaquePointer (and CFunctionPointer) (Part II, Xcode 6 Beta 6) (2,127)

Swift: Use for-in loops with your own sequence types (1,915)

Pure Swift: A method for replacing occurrences of a string within a string (Xcode 6 Beta 5) (1,429)

Pure Swift: A little deeper into generics (Xcode 6 Beta 5 and Beta 6) (1,401)

Swift: Bytes for Beginners (Part I) (1,371)

Pure Swift: Conversion of Cocoa dependent code (Xcode 6 Beta 5) (1,084)

Swift: Bytes for Beginners (Part II) (1,060)

Swift: AnyObject is not your only option for mixing things up ('Collections of Protocol Types') (1,009)

September

Swift: The rules of being weak and unowned in closures and capture lists (Xcode 6 Beta 7) (2,867)

Polymorphism and Protocols in Swift (Xcode 6.0.1) (2,393)

Swift: Overriding vs Overloading (Xcode 6 GM) (1,902)

Swift: A basic step-by-step use of a Swift class from an Objective-C file (Xcode 6 GM) (1,868)

Swift: The difference between a closure and an @autoclosure (Xcode 6 GM) (1,642)

Swift: The rules of being lazy (Xcode 6 Beta 7) (1,626)

Unsafe pointers in Swift: How to build a zombie (Part III, Xcode 6 Beta 7) (1,579)

Swift: The rules of being class (Xcode 6 Beta 7) (1,342)

Swift: The rules of being weak (Xcode 6 Beta 7) (1,321)

Swift: The rules of being static (Xcode 6 GM) (1,301)

Review: Swift Development with Cocoa by Jon Manning, Paris Buttfield-Addison and Tim Nugent (Early Release, O'Reilly) (1,214)

Swift: The rules of being unowned (Xcode 6 Beta 7) (1,046)

October

Playing with the Primitives: Characters, chars and strings in Swift and Objective-C (Xcode 6.1)

(2,218)

A year of thinking in circles: 2015 (Xcode 6.1) (1,932)

Swift by Numbers: The long and the short of it (Xcode 6.0.1) (1,296)

November

Swift: Drawing Regular Polygons with CGPath, CGContext, UIBezierPath and CAShapeLayer (1,343)

The Power of Hexagons: Starting from scratch with 3D drawing in Swift (CAShapeLayer, CGPath) (1,185)

Swift: How to draw a clock face using CoreGraphics and CoreText (Part 1) (1,106)

December

Swift: The quiet affair of the failable initializer and the nil coalescing operator (1,585)

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