mikeash.com: NSBlog

Tags: community mailinglist link cocoaMy recent whining about ridiculous moderation policies on cocoa-dev has borne fruit! Brent Simmons has graciously created cocoa-unbound, a group dedicated to Cocoa discussion but without the foolishness. I've already joined, and I encourage you to do so as well. A well-trafficked mailing list where we can talk about Mac programming without minions of the Mothership getting in our way will be a wonderful resource to have.

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Some Light Reading at 2010-05-21 16:02

Tags: linkAs I mentioned last week, I'm shifting Friday Q&A to a biweekly schedule, so there will be no Friday Q&A this week. However, I've dug up a few articles that I enjoyed reading this week and that I thought you might enjoy as well.

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Mistakes and Chains of Events at 2010-04-19 19:18

Tags: apple iphone rant link rogueamoebaFor those of you who don't read my employer's blog, I just made a post over there titled Mistakes and Chains of Events. It discusses the recent news about political cartoonist Mark Fiore's iPhone rejection, the bigger picture of Apple's system and policies, and my perception that Apple is not learning the right lessons from the various problems that they're encountering.

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Objective-C Runtime Podcast Episode at Mobile Orchard at 2009-08-31 16:39

Tags: interview linkLast week I recorded an interview with Dan Grigsby of Mobile Orchard and today it showed up in his podcast. It's pretty much the same material as covered in my series on the Objective-C runtime but now in audio form, so if you like audio then get to the podcast here.

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Reading Between the Lines of Apple's FCC Reply at 2009-08-21 23:17

Tags: iphone linkI've just written a blog post for my evil taskmasters which I thought this audience would be interested in too. It's called Reading Between the Lines of Apple's FCC Reply and talks about Apple's response to the FCC's inquiry over the rejection of the Google Voice iPhone application. My favorite part is, "With 17,000 reviews per week and 45 reviewers, that means each reviewer performs 378 reviews per week. At 40 hours per week, this is 9.4 reviews per hour, or one review every 6.4 minutes." I encourage you to make your way over to Under the Microscope and read the whole thing.

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Nanogolf at 2009-05-08 16:22

Tags: iphone linkI'm afraid I have to skip Friday Q&A one more week but I hope to be back up next week, because one of the things that's been keeping me busy has finally shipped! It's called Nanogolf, and it's a multiplayer mini golf game for the Mac and iPhone. My partner and I have been hard at work on this for a long time and it's nice to finally see it out in the wild. The Mac version is free, the iPhone version is cheap, and they can play against each other. Go forth and soothe your Q&A pangs with a nice round of miniature golf.

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Late Night Cocoa: NSOperationQueue Problems at 2009-02-11 18:04

Tags: interview nsoperationqueue linkI've done another appearance on Late Night Cocoa, this time discussing NSOperationQueue problems. Check it out over at The Mac Developer Network.

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RAOperationQueue, an open-source replacement for NSOperationQueue at 2008-12-02 17:24

Tags: nsoperationqueue link bugThe other day I posted about how NSOperationQueue is broken and can't be used. At Rogue Amoeba we liked the API so much we decided to create a non-broken version, so we've released RAOperationQueue. It's not a 100% replacement, as it has some significant limitations (and some benefits) compared to NSOperationQueue, but we've found it to be very useful. For more information, click the link above.

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NetAwake at 2008-09-15 02:28

Tags: link iphoneI just wanted to make a quick post to note that I've released my first iPhone app, NetAwake. It's a Wake-on-LAN program with a fancy ZeroConf-based MAC grabber to make it accessible to people who think that MACs are the computers you buy from APPLE. Credit should also go to my partner Joshua, who did all of the work on the GUI.

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Late Night Cocoa at 2008-09-05 23:31

Tags: interview link atomic threadingReaders of this blog may be interested in my recent appearance on Late Night Cocoa. I discussed the fundamental principles and basic concepts behind lockless thread-safe data structures. You can access the episode here.

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Tales from the Sausage Factory: Why Those Big Downloads for Simple Updates? at 2008-03-21 23:40

Tags: update linkI don't know what it is about March, but it seems like I can't keep away from this blog. This is a bit less technical than I usually like to have here, but I think it's still interesting, and in any case it's a nifty place to be published. You can read Tales from the Sausage Factory: Why Those Big Downloads for Simple Updates? over at TidBITS.

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Use strnstr at 2008-03-18 20:49

Tags: strnstr security tiger link osbugA few months ago I told everyone not to use strnstr. This bug was fixed in Leopard, but persisted in Tiger. Today, Apple finally fixed it in Tiger. Now you can safely use strnstr. I assume that this bug probably still exists on Panther and earlier, but as long as you're targeting Tiger and up (as every sane person ought to), you are now safe.

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Code Signing and You at 2008-03-07 20:32

Tags: codesigning linkI just posted a long treatise on code signing over at my place of employment. I'm posting this for the few people who read my blog but not that one. Link after the fold because my RSS feed generator sucks.

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How To Shrink Your Source Code at 2007-03-07 00:00

Tags: link humor I've written a handy article which should be useful to anyone whose C source code is too large and needs to be reduced. It outlines ten easy techniques you can use to reduce the size of your code. For reasons unknown to me, my employers seem to actually like it when I enter contests which revolve around making horrible code, and so you can read the article over at Under the Microscope.

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Making Xcode Better at 2006-05-31 00:00

Tags: link xcode I don't normally post these kinds of articles that are just links, but I really like this link, and also I haven't posted in a long time and I don't want anybody to think I'm dead. So I present to you: King of the Xcode. On the unlikely chance that there are any Apple employees reading who have a say in this sort of thing, please please please take his advice. I hold no illusions about my readership, but I am nothing if not hopeful.

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What Every Programmer Should Know at 2006-02-21 00:00

Tags: link float numerical I have a short post for once! I happened to be talking about floating-point comparisons, and I trotted out my usual web page explaining all about floating-point calculation and error. And then I thought, this stuff is so essential, I ought to post it here as well. So without further ado: What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic. A bit heavy on the math, but if you've ever wondered why printing out 10.1 gives you 10.1000002, or why 1.0/10.0 * 5.0 != 1.0/2.0, this will explain it all.

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