I have an upcoming iPhone application, Cartographer, that is highly stylised and requires high customisation of the interface to achieve a convincing, beautiful vintage look. To make it work, I needed transparent toolbars and navigation bars for my UIViewController-based views.
The solution I came up with for this was to implement a category on UINavigationBar and UIToolbar, and overriding drawRect: with a method that does absolutely nothing. Then I can place my own textures behind the bar, and they’ll be seen, instead of the default bar background. Read More



Reginald RegEx explorer
With a desperate need to debug a lengthy regular expression destined for use with the excellent RegexKitLite library, I have quickly put together a Mac OS X application.
Provide some sample input, and your regular expression, and Reginald will provide you with colour-coded output and a list of all your matches and the corresponding capture groups for your exploration. Select a match or capture group in the list to the right, and the corresponding text will be selected in the panel to the left.
Reginald is built on RegexKitLite, and so uses the ICU syntax.
It will run on Mac OS X 10.6 and above.
Download Reginald here, or access the source on GitHub.