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Sep 20, 2010 (an Objective-C era article)
In this post, I build and run a Cocoa Mac application on the command-line. This might not sound like a very difficult goal but I'll attempt to follow an additional constraint: use as few tools, components, classes and even lines of code as possible; truly minimalist Cocoa programming. The goal is to create an application that qualifies as a proper Mac application (including a menubar and a window) but without using Xcode, without an Info.plist file, without NIB files, without Interface Builder and without even using a text editor other than the Terminal itself.
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Sep 14, 2010 (an Objective-C era article)
In this post, I take a casual look at the relative performance overheads handling tasks in different ways: performing all tasks in the main thread, sending tasks to a single worker thread, spawning new threads for every task, and using Grand Central Dispatch (GCD). This won't be a particularly advanced investigation, simply a quick overview of simplicity versus performance in job management.
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Sep 6, 2010 (an Objective-C era article)
In this post, I'll show you how you can load a webpage in a UIWebView in iOS while using a modified NSURLCache to substitute local copies of resources within the webpage for the remote copies referred to by the actual page.
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Aug 30, 2010 (an Objective-C era article)
In this post, I'll show you how you can create objects without using the standard instance allocation process (either +[NSObject alloc] or class_createInstance()). I'll also explain why you might do this — the benefits and drawbacks to a custom object creation process.
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Jul 15, 2010 (an Objective-C era article)
Recent articles by Jesper have re-ignited some discussion about whether Apple might be working on another programming language to replace Objective-C. Neither of these articles closely examined a related but possibly more important question: is Apple planning to move application development to a virtual machine? In this article, I'll look at why I think moving to a virtual machine might happen along with a possible language transition.
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Jul 6, 2010 (an Objective-C era article)
In this post, I'll show you ways to determine which version of iOS you are running on and show you how to write a macro that can both conditionally compile and runtime switch between the code for different versions of iOS.
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Jun 30, 2010 (an Objective-C era article)
In this post, I'll look at some very subtle problems that can occur if a getter or setter method chooses the wrong memory management pattern and in the process, explain why NSDictionary copies its keys rather than simply retains them.
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Jun 22, 2010 (an Objective-C era article)
I was recently asked by a reader if I used any modelling program to model the classes and relationships in my Mac applications. The answer is no, I don't model the application side of my programs. The reason for this is not because applications are always small and simple. The reason is that all applications have approximately the same design — eventually everything in a well-designed application becomes intuitive.
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Jun 10, 2010 (an Objective-C era article)
If you sorted an NSMutableArray with a comparison method that randomly returns either higher or lower, would the result be an even, random distribution? Spoiler: no it won't but the actual distribution is interesting nonetheless. I'll show you what would happen if you did sort this way (and also show you how to correctly randomize an array if you did want an even distribution).
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Jun 2, 2010 (an Objective-C era article)
The system-wide thread pool of libdispatch's global queue is an easy way to efficiently manage concurrent operations but it is not the solution to all threading problems and it is not without its own class of problems. In this post I look at deadlocks and latency problems that are inherent in thread-pool based solutions like libdispatch's global concurrent queue so that you will know when you should use this option and when you need something else.
