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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.
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May 25, 2010 (an Objective-C era article)
When an application crashes on the iPhone, it disappears without telling the user what happened. However, it is possible to add exception and signal handling to your applications so that an error message can be displayed to the user or you can save changes. It is even possible to try to recover from this situation without crashing at all.
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May 17, 2010 (an Objective-C era article)
In this post, I look at 5 different ways that you can draw a very simple shape: a square with a triangular hole cut out of the center. In a drawing environment like CoreGraphics which offers double buffering, winding count path filling, even-odd path filling and clipping regions, there's no single answer. An iPhone sample project is provided containing the code but all drawing functions are identical on the Mac.
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May 12, 2010 (an Objective-C era article)
In this post, I'll take a high-level look at how malloc is implemented on the Mac. I'll look at how memory is allocated for "tiny", "small" and "large" allocation scales, the multi-core performance improvements introduced in Snow Leopard and some inbuilt debugging features you can trigger for finding memory problems including buffer overruns.
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May 6, 2010 (an Objective-C era article)
A simple post this week but one which optimizes a common task: locating the application support directory for the current application, creating it if it doesn't exist. The result makes accessing the current application's support directory a single line and provides a structure for locating and creating folders at other standard locations with similar ease.
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Apr 27, 2010 (an Objective-C era article)
In this last of three posts about porting a Mac application to Windows, I look at the steps involved in setting up The Cocotron with a remote debugging session between Xcode and the application running on Windows. I'll also talk about the code that didn't "just work" and some of the approaches I used to fix the program and get it working.
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Apr 21, 2010 (an Objective-C era article)
In this post, I'll talk about how multi-platform applications are structured and talk about some of the different ways that applications separate core logic from platform specific behaviors. I'll talk about how using a porting layer like The Cocotron fits into these designs and why using The Cocotron doesn't necessarily mean that you're ignoring best-practice or creating a second-class application.
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Apr 15, 2010 (an Objective-C era article)
There are a few different options for porting Objective-C/Cocoa applications to Windows. Each option has different advantages and offers different capabilities. In this post, I'll give an overview of some of these options, their advantages and disadvantages.
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Apr 7, 2010 (an Objective-C era article)
If your iPhone OS application makes heavy use of the network, there are a few extra settings your application will require to ensure the network works correctly and Apple will approve your application. These requirements are not always obvious (some are documented, others are only implied in documentation). I thought I'd share them so that you can avoid network dropouts and unnecessary App Store rejections.
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Apr 3, 2010 (an Objective-C era article)
StreamToMe is on the App Store for the iPad from day 1, so you can watch video and play music stored on your Mac using your iPad wherever you are.
