Cocoa with Love

Version control for solo Mac developers

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

In this post, I'll take a quick look at how to keep your projects in git and how to manage that easily on the Mac. More importantly though, I'll take a look at why you'd want to do this, even if you're the only developer, you don't need to share your code, you don't have formalized releases that need to be tagged and you already have a backup system protecting your code.

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Back to the Mac? 12 features from iOS I'd like to see in Lion

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

A few user-features of Mac OS X Lion have been announced but no Cocoa API changes have been publicly announced. However, I think there are dozens of non-user areas where the Cocoa Mac APIs could be improved by integrating approaches from Cocoa Touch APIs. What follows are a dozen areas where I'd like to see a more iOS approach in Mac OS X Lion.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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