Latest Proceedings: JSPortal.app, gh-unit and drilldown UIPickerView

Todays post is a about where i'm at with my current iPhone project and what i've been up to tech-wise.

My current project: JSPortal(.app)
I'm currently working on an iPhone App for a friend's WebApp called JSPortal.
I don't want to go into too much detail in this post but let me at least tell you that it is a quite cool time- and budget tracking software. It's also free of charge for up to 3 users. If you are looking for something to keep track of your development projects you should check it out.
Joost did a great job in providing a demo mode that let's you demo the WebApp right away. No signup, no email verification. Peace of mind.
The first version of the iPhone App is going to help JSPortal's users assigning work time to projects.
Since last week i made a lot of progress and hope i can finish it in time. This would be the 29th of October. Let's see if i can make it.


Unit Testing with gh-unit
Back in my Java days i wrote a lot of automated unit tests with JUnit. Since i started making my first iPhone game i've become a bit somewhat slack and didn't do much testing. Last week i finally started looking into testing again. At first i looked into OCUnit which i understand is shipped with XCode. It runs the tests during the build and you can see the results in the build view. I see that running them together with the build has its advantages. Such as having your build simply fail when there are tests not running. But here's the thing, i'm a very graphics oriented person and i only want to look into my tests when i'm running them. I want to see green and red bars. That's it. The gh-unit project runs its tests seperately from the build. The iPhone version of gh-unit runs the tests within an own iPhone AppDelegate which gives you also the opportunity to test aspects of your view as well. The only issue is that it also misses my beloved green and red bars. So i went a head and forked the gh-unit project and implemented them.
I feel that the table-view with these rather big bars and labels works well for a limited number of tests. For bigger projects smaller rows might be better. I can also see a custom view with lots of little squares for each test-method. That way you might not see which method in detail failed but you'll have a better overview over which suites/classes passed.


Drilldown UIPickerView Component
I still consider myself more of a freshman in the UIKit area but i also feel like my understanding is growing a bit every day i work with it. Today i was able to create a UIPickerView component that supports nested elements. It has some really hacky bits in it (the code, not the view) but it works well. It is also reusable because it gets its row items from a delegate. If someone is interested in the sourcecode, let me know.