NSBlog

Friday Q&A 2010-08-27: Defensive Programming in Cocoa

Fri, 27 Aug 2010 15:19:00 GMT

Welcome back to another word-laden edition of Friday Q&A. About a year ago, I wrote a post on defensive programming. That post covered defensive programming in a general sense, and Scott Gould has requested that I write one specific to various standard Cocoa practices, which is what I will be talking about today.
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Friday Q&A 2010-08-12: Implementing NSCoding

Fri, 13 Aug 2010 16:35:00 GMT

Welcome back to another frightening edition of Friday Q&A. This time around, friend and local OS X coder Jose Vazquez has suggested that I discuss how to implement NSCoding in Objective-C classes.
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Friday Q&A 2010-07-30: Zeroing Weak References to CoreFoundation Objects

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 19:01:00 GMT

It's time for another friendly edition of Friday Q&A. For my last Friday Q&A, I talked about MAZeroingWeakRef and how it's implemented for pure Objective-C objects. For this one, I'm going to discuss the crazy hacks I implemented to make it work with toll-free bridged CoreFoundation objects as well.
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Introducing MAZeroingWeakRef

Fri, 16 Jul 2010 20:19:00 GMT

I'm extremely excited to announce a new library for Cocoa and Cocoa Touch development: MAZeroingWeakRef. In short, it's a library which allows zeroing weak references to be used in retain/release Cocoa code. This has all sorts of uses and should make retain/release coding less painful. While I discussed this in detail in my Friday Q&A post this week, I also want to make a separate announcement for people who don't want to read through all of the horrible details.
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Friday Q&A 2010-07-16: Zeroing Weak References in Objective-C

Fri, 16 Jul 2010 20:18:00 GMT

It's that time of the biweek again. For this week's Friday Q&A, Mike Shields has suggested that I talk about weak references in Objective-C, and specifically zeroing weak references. I've gone a bit further and actually implemented a class that provides zeroing weak references in Objective-C using manual memory management.
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Friday Q&A 2010-07-02: Background Timers

Fri, 02 Jul 2010 16:45:00 GMT

Welcome back to another Friday Q&A. This week I'm departing from my usual user-driven format to present a class I've written for what I'm calling "background timers", and discuss potential uses for it.
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Blocks and GCD in Russian

Tue, 29 Jun 2010 15:22:00 GMT

Alexander Babaev has been kind enough to translate my series of posts on blocks and GCD into Russian for TouchDev.ru. So far he has posted two, Blocks in Objective-C and Intro to Grand Central Dispatch, Part I. Others in the series will be going up in the future. If you happen to speak Russian, check them out!
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Friday Q&A 2010-06-18: Implementing Equality and Hashing

Fri, 18 Jun 2010 14:48:00 GMT

Welcome back to a late edition of Friday Q&A. WWDC pushed the schedule back one week, but it's finally time for another one. This week, I'm going to discuss the implementation of equality and hashing in Cocoa, a topic suggested by Steven Degutis.
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Friday Q&A 2010-05-28: Leopard Collection Classes

Fri, 28 May 2010 16:43:00 GMT

Welcome back to another edition of Friday Q&A. For this week's post, I'm going to talk about three somewhat obscure collections classes that were introduced to Cocoa in 10.5: NSPointerArray, NSHashTable, and NSMapTable, a topic suggested by Phil Holland.
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Some Light Reading

Fri, 21 May 2010 16:02:00 GMT

As 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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SocketObjC: A Networkable Messaging Library

Mon, 17 May 2010 21:27:00 GMT

Reader Steven Degutis was inspired by my post about Distributed Objects and decided to make something that avoided those pitfalls. The result is SocketObjC, a remote messaging library that uses continuation passing style to achieve full asynchronous messaging. I haven't tried it, but it's worth checking out.
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Friday Q&A 2010-05-14: What Every Apple Programmer Should Know

Fri, 14 May 2010 15:36:00 GMT

Welcome back to another Friday Q&A. This week, Quentin Carnicelli (who is heavily involved in generating my paychecks) has suggested that I talk about things that every Apple programmer should know. In other words, common Cocoa design and implementation decisions that I'd prefer Apple not to make.
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iPhone Apps I Can't Have

Fri, 14 May 2010 02:46:00 GMT

During a recent discussion on Twitter about Apple's draconion App Store policies, I mentioned that there's a long list of apps I want which Apple does not allow, and thus these restrictions directly hurt me not only as a developer, but as an iPhone user. This made @pbur curious, and he indicated he'd like to know what those apps are. So I sat down and came up with a list of apps that I really want for my iPhone but that Apple won't let me have. To the best of my knowledge, every single one of these ideas is completely feasible in a technical sense, wouldn't destroy the cell network, wouldn't make your phone's battery life unusably short, and are kept out of my hands solely because Apple thinks it knows what's best for me.
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Another Week Without Friday Q&A

Fri, 07 May 2010 23:08:00 GMT

I must apologize, but I ran out of time this week and don't have a Friday Q&A for you to enjoy. If you want something to read, you might enjoy +initialize Can Be Executed Multiple Times (+load not so much) from Bill Bumgarner, Collection Extensions from friend-of-the-blog Guy English, and launchd: Better than sliced bread! from Chris Hanson.
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Friday Q&A 2010-04-30: Dealing with Retain Cycles

Fri, 30 Apr 2010 15:29:00 GMT

Happy iPad 3G day to everyone. Whether you're waiting in line, waiting for the delivery guy, or just pining at home like I am, you can fill your idle moments with another edition of Friday Q&A. This week, Filip van der Meeren has suggested that I discuss retain cycles and how to deal with them.
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Friday Q&A 2010-04-23: Implementing a Custom Slider

Fri, 23 Apr 2010 16:01:00 GMT

Welcome to another chilling edition of Friday Q&A. While I hope to be soaring over the scenic Shenandoah Valley on this fine Friday, I have taken the precaution of preparing my post in advance, so that you may see it even while I am incommunicado. Such is the magic of the modern world. This week, Michael Crawford has suggested that I give in example of implementing a custom control in Cocoa.
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Mistakes and Chains of Events

Mon, 19 Apr 2010 19:18:00 GMT

For 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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Friday Q&A 2010-04-16: Implementing Fast Enumeration

Fri, 16 Apr 2010 16:35:00 GMT

Last week I discussed the various options available in Objective-C for enumerating over a collection This week I'm going to finish up the discussion of enumeration with a guide on how to implement Fast Enumeration in your own program.
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An Objective-C Continuations Library

Tue, 13 Apr 2010 16:25:00 GMT

A couple of months ago I wrote about using Continuation Passing Style in Objective-C as an alternative technique for returning errors from methods. The major downside to that technique is that it integrates poorly with Cocoa, since Cocoa isn't written to use CPS. Jordan Breeding has spent the intervening time building up an impressive CPS adapter library which allows converting any Cocoa NSError ** call into CPS style with virtually no work. Source code and extensive examples are available, and I encourage you to check it out.
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Friday Q&A 2010-04-09: Comparison of Objective-C Enumeration Techniques

Fri, 09 Apr 2010 11:17:00 GMT

Welcome back to another edition of Friday Q&A. Preston Sumner has suggested that I talk about different ways of enumerating over collections in Cocoa, and how to implement Fast Enumeration. This will be a two part series: this week I will look at the different enumeration techniques and their pros and cons, and then next week I will take you through implementing Fast Enumeration on a custom object.
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