When working on iOS projects, there are some tasks that you find yourself doing over and over. For example, using NSURLRequest and NSURLConnection to call an API, or download a file. There are many heavyweight libraries out there (e.g. ASIHTTPRequest) which are great for larger projects, but I wanted to produce a small and lightweight library that encapsulates the common behaviours needed to access a web service, download a small image, etc. that are core activities within most modern apps.

You can find JEDownloader on GitHub here: https://github.com/jonathanellis/jedownloader

Developing apps, I found I spent a lot of time in Photoshop making minor adjustments and then having to export them at both retina (@2x) and standard resolutions. After unsuccessfully searching online to try and find any scripts, plugins or apps to generate the non-retina images automatically, I took the plunge and wrote one myself.

Simply export all of your images as PNGs from Photoshop (or other image editing package) at retina resolution, with the @2x suffix, and this PHP (CLI) script will scale the images to 50% and copy them without the @2x suffix. Unlike many other image resizing scripts out there, my version fully supports alpha transparency.

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