A few years ago, I was working on a project building an internal App Store for a client. The backend was written using Ruby on Rails. I was giving a demo to some other engineers in the company when I noticed that app icons were failing to load. When I started digging into it I noticed that this only happened in Chrome — Safari loaded and displayed the images just fine.

Knowing a bit about the PNG optimizations Xcode performs, I started looking into the images. Sure enough, the root cause was that the images I was extracting from the .ipa files as part of the build upload process had their channels swapped. Safari, for whatever reason, knew how to reverse the process; Chrome did not (not that I blame it — good on it for refusing to load random files masquerading as PNGs).

I kicked around several potential approaches for fixing the problem. The most foolproof solution was to use Xcode’s...

Or how I learned to stop procrastinating and write something down.

After several failed attempts at this I finally decided to let somebody else deal with the infrastructure, and I’ll focus on the writing instead (more on that in a later post).

In retrospect, this may very well turn out to be a bad idea — if there’s anything the Internet needs it surely isn’t yet another person yelling into the wind. Maybe I should have asked Ryan to setup my blog.