Newcomers to iPhone development are sometimes surprised at how ugly the standard button controls are. They quickly learn that they need a graphics person to create a nice-looking button image in Photoshop and then attach that to the buttons. However, in this tutorial, I'll show how to create nice shiny buttons in code, without any image files, by using a CAGradientLayer.

I'm playing around with JavaScript in my spare time, and have started creating a web app. As I usually do, particularly when learning something new, I am using a test-driven development approach. I looked at a few JavaScript unit-testing frameworks, and decided to go with QUnit, the testing framework used by the jQuery project.

QUnit isn't too hard to set up or use, but my unfamiliarity with JavaScript, jQuery, and related things meant it took a little more work than it should have. A few out-of-date QUnit tutorials on the web made things worse. So, here is a quick-and-dirty QUnit tutorial that might be helpful for others who are the same boat that I was in.