Cocoa with Love

A Cocoa application for running scripts

Nov 12, 2010 (an Objective-C era article)

Last week, I showed a bash script that you can use to build, tag and package a Mac application. As I'll show you this time though, I prefer to use a compiled Mac application to do the same thing. The important code here is a set of classes that support script-like invocations of other programs and support for a structured build-log based on the results of each step.

Read more...
A deployment script for a generic Cocoa Mac application

Nov 5, 2010 (an Objective-C era article)

Deployment for a Cocoa Mac application normally involves a few common steps: committing code into a repository, updating version numbers and packaging the application as a DMG disk image. In this post, I'll show you a combination bash/perl/Applescript to handle all these tasks in a single script.

Read more...
An iOS tone generator (an introduction to AudioUnits)

Oct 20, 2010 (an Objective-C era article)

In this post, I present a tiny iOS app that generates a continuous tone at a frequency determined by a slider. It's a small sample app intended to show the simplest way to send audio data you generate to the speaker.

Read more...
Testing if an arbitrary pointer is a valid object pointer

Oct 6, 2010 (an Objective-C era article)

In this post, I look at an approach for testing if an arbitrary pointer is a pointer to a valid Objective-C object. The result from the test is not absolutely accurate and can interfere with gdb debugging if the pointer isn't a valid memory location, so this is not something you'd want to do often (and certainly not in production code). But it can be a handy debugging tool for when you're staring blindly at memory you didn't allocate.

Read more...
A ZoomingViewController to animate a UIView to fullscreen

Sep 26, 2010 (an Objective-C era article)

ZoomingViewController is a class you can attach to any existing view that will let you zoom the view to fullscreen with a single tap, rotate the view while in fullscreen by rotating the device and tap to return to the original inline state.

Read more...
Minimalist Cocoa programming

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.

Read more...
The overhead of spawning threads (a performance experiment)

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.

Read more...
Substituting local data for remote UIWebView requests

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.

Read more...
Alternative Objective-C object allocation for large arrays

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.

Read more...
Is a virtual machine for Cocoa programming inevitable?

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.

Read more...