This week, I'll show you a few keyboard related tricks for editing in Xcode, including setting up multiple copy-and-paste buffers by adjusting the key mappings, switching tabs on or off for autocomplete and other text editing quirks in Xcode like understanding why the "End" key doesn't move to the end of the line on the Mac.

In this post, I'll discuss iPhone program design using the example of a small but non-trivial iPhone application to provide examples of how the design is implemented. The design includes: how to manage data coming from different sources, how to manage multiple views of that data and how to design your program so it remains simple and manageable as it grows. In short, I'll be discussing how Model-View-Controller (MVC) applies to an iPhone application but I'll also discuss how even simple programs are considerably more hierarchic through their controllers and branched through their models and views than the basic description "Model-View-Controller" might imply.

Not all Xcode project templates are alike. Especially the Core Data Command Line Tool...

Comma-separated value (CSV) files are one of the most commonly used data formats for exchanging rows of simple data. There are many implementations of CSV parsing for Cocoa strings but the purpose of this post is to use the example of an RFC4180 compliant CSV parser implementation to show you the basics of writing a recursive descent parser for importing data into your Cocoa applications.

In Mac OS X 10.5, Core Data switched from using valueForKey: as the recommended way to access Core Data attributes and relationships to auto-generated accessor methods. This new approach is faster for fetching values but lacks NSKeyValueCoding's ability to coalesce the values extracted from every object in a "to-many" relationship in a single statement. In this post, I'll look at replacing the NSSet traversal and NSSet coalescing abilities offered by NSKeyValueCoding with an approach that invokes accessor methods directly to see if I can bring some of the performance improvement of auto-generated accessor methods to situations involving NSSet traversals.

As pointed out by Mike Ash in his recent Friday Q&A 2009-11-13: Dangerous Cocoa Calls, NSHost is not thread-safe for use outside of the main thread and due to potentially slow, synchronous network access is not really suitable for use on the main thread either. Fortunately, in Cocoa there are often ways to transparently fix classes that don't work as they should. In this post, I'll show you how you can transparently patch NSHost using a drop-in solution and provide a non-blocking solution for NSHost lookups.

In this part, I expand on the simple techniques presented in the first part by adding different line, effect and texture styles. I'll also present some Mac application icons and simple texturing.

In this two part series, I'll give a beginner's guide to creating iPhone and Mac application icons using Inkscape — a free, vector illustration program. In this first part, I'll talk about the common styles and traits of icons on the Mac and iPhone and give a step-by-step guide to creating the first iPhone icon in Inkscape.

Objective-2.0 property methods are a nice convenience but if you need to override a property implementation — particularly an atomic, retained or copied object setter property — there are some potential bugs you can create if you don't follow the rules carefully. I'll show you the pitfalls and the correct way to implement a property accessor. I'll also show a way to directly invoke hidden runtime functions to let Objective-C perform atomic getting and setting safely for you.

This post is a look at how clang implements blocks and how this implementation leads to a number of strange behaviors including local variables that end up global, Objective-C objects allocated on the stack instead of the heap, C variables that behave like C++ references, Objective-C objects in non-Objective-C languages, copy methods that don't copy and retain methods that don't retain.