Archive

April 2026

• Training an LLM in Swift, Part 1: Taking matrix multiplication from Gflop/s to Tflop/s

December 2025

• Have LLMs improved for Swift coding in the last 12 months?

December 2024

• Using Copilot to write a raindrop audio synthesizer using AVAudioEngine

March 2021

• App architecture basics in SwiftUI Part 4: Services

February 2021

• App architecture basics in SwiftUI Part 3: Module-separated layers

January 2021

• App architecture basics in SwiftUI, Part 2: SwiftUI's natural pattern

December 2020

• App architecture basics in SwiftUI, Part 1: Coding through iteration and integration

August 2019

• 22 short tests of combine – Part 3: Asynchrony
• 22 short tests of combine – Part 2: Sharing
• 22 short tests of Combine – Part 1: Protocols

June 2019

• First impressions of SwiftUI

May 2019

• Declarative Views

April 2019

• Introducing CwlViews

October 2018

• Article updates, 2018 edition

September 2018

• A Farewell to StreamToMe

January 2018

• Model-View-Controller without the Controller

December 2017

• A view construction syntax

November 2017

• View-state driven applications

October 2017

• The worst possible application

August 2017

• CwlLayout: a Swift wrapper around Auto Layout

June 2017

• About flatMap, compactMap and monads
• Statements, messages and reducers

February 2017

• Looking at Model-View-Controller in Cocoa
• The weirdest subclass I've ever written

January 2017

• Using 'swift package fetch' in an Xcode project
• Compiling a Mac OS 8 application on macOS Sierra

December 2016

• A key-value observing wrapper
• Reference counted releases in Swift

November 2016

• What is reactive programming and why should I use it?
• CwlSignal, a library for reactive programming

October 2016

• Testing actions over time
• Specifying function execution contexts

September 2016

• Optimizing a copy-on-write double-ended queue in Swift
• Updating Cocoa with Love for Swift 3

August 2016

• Values and errors, part 2: eight languages compared
• Values and errors, part 1: 'Result' in Swift

July 2016

• Design patterns for safe timer usage
• Exponential time complexity in the Swift type checker

June 2016

• Parsing whitespace in an Xcode extension
• Mutexes and closure capture in Swift

May 2016

• Random number generators in Swift
• Comparing Swift to C++ for parsing

April 2016

• Presenting unanticipated errors to users
• Indent with tabs or spaces? I wish I didn't need to know.

March 2016

• Breaking Swift with reference counted structs
• Errors: unexpected, composite, non-pure, external.
• Gathering system information in Swift with sysctl

February 2016

• Tracking tasks with stack traces in Swift
• Use it or lose it: why safe C is sometimes unsafe Swift
• Partial functions in Swift, Part 2: Catching precondition failures

January 2016

• Partial functions in Swift, Part 1: Avoidance
• A new era for Cocoa with Love

June 2011

• A big weakness in Objective-C's weak typing
• An RSS-feed and location-based iOS application

May 2011

• Classes for fetching and parsing XML or JSON via HTTP
• Presenting a Mac dialog sheet with visual cue effects

April 2011

• Background audio through an iOS movie player
• User interface strings in Cocoa

March 2011

• Mac QuartzGL (2D drawing on the graphics card) performance
• A history of iOS media APIs (iPhone OS 2.0 to iOS 4.3)

January 2011

• Advanced drawing using AppKit
• Submitting functionality for a future version of iOS

December 2010

• UITableView construction, drawing and management (revisited)
• Version control for solo Mac developers

November 2010

• Back to the Mac? 12 features from iOS I'd like to see in Lion
• A Cocoa application for running scripts
• A deployment script for a generic Cocoa Mac application

October 2010

• An iOS tone generator (an introduction to AudioUnits)
• Testing if an arbitrary pointer is a valid object pointer

September 2010

• A ZoomingViewController to animate a UIView to fullscreen
• Minimalist Cocoa programming
• The overhead of spawning threads (a performance experiment)
• Substituting local data for remote UIWebView requests

August 2010

• Alternative Objective-C object allocation for large arrays

July 2010

• Is a virtual machine for Cocoa programming inevitable?
• Tips & Tricks for conditional iOS3, iOS3.2 and iOS4 code

June 2010

• Assign, retain, copy: pitfalls in Obj-C property accessors
• The design of every Mac application
• Sorting an NSMutableArray with a random comparison method
• Avoiding deadlocks and latency in libdispatch

May 2010

• Handling unhandled exceptions and signals
• 5 ways to draw a 2D shape with a hole in CoreGraphics
• A look at how malloc works on the Mac
• Finding or creating the application support directory

April 2010

• Porting a Mac program to Windows using The Cocotron
• Design of a multi-platform app using The Cocotron
• Options for porting Objective-C/Cocoa apps to Windows
• Network data requirements on iPhone OS devices
• StreamToMe is available for the iPad!

March 2010

• Streaming MP3/AAC audio again
• Dynamic ivars: solving a fragile base class problem
• Custom UI Bindings in Interface Builder
• Designing a view with Bindings (UITableView on the Mac)
• Load from NIB or construct views in code: which is faster?

February 2010

• StreamToMe 2.0 is out (and Cocoa With Love is 2 years old).
• Resolving a path containing a mixture of aliases and symlinks
• The differences between Core Data and a Database
• Custom build rules, generated tables and faster floating point
• Finding the cause of performance issues in your programs

January 2010

• 5 key-value coding approaches in Cocoa
• What is a meta-class in Objective-C?
• Getting the subclasses of an Objective-C class
• Quality control in application development without unit testing

December 2009

• A sample iPhone application with complete unit tests
• A sample Mac application with complete unit tests
• Multiple copy buffers, cursor and tab key tricks in Xcode
• The design of an iPhone application
• There's a Garbage Collection ninja hiding in the project templates

November 2009

• Writing a parser using NSScanner (a CSV parsing example)
• Performance tests: Replacing Core Data Key Paths
• A drop-in fix for the problems with NSHost
• Creating iPhone and Mac icons using Inkscape (Part 2 of 2)
• Creating iPhone and Mac icons using Inkscape (Part 1 of 2)

October 2009

• Memory and thread-safe custom property methods
• How blocks are implemented (and the consequences)
• Objective-C's niche: why it survives in a world of alternatives
• The ugly side of blocks: explicit declarations and casting.

September 2009

• Optimizing the loading of a very large table on the iPhone
• StreamToMe Version 1.1 available
• WhereIsMyMac, a Snow Leopard CoreLocation project
• Building for earlier OS versions from Snow Leopard
• Creating alpha masks from text on the iPhone and Mac
• An NSSplitView delegate for priority based resizing

August 2009

• StreamToMe iPhone App Released
• Adding shadow effects to UITableView using CAGradientLayer
• Animating a window to fullscreen on the Mac
• Safe, threaded design and inter-thread communication
• Control and configuration of applications through Info.plist

July 2009

• Rules to avoid retain cycles
• Temporary files and folders in Cocoa
• A simple, extensible HTTP server in Cocoa
• HashValue: an object for holding MD5 and SHA hashes
• Custom views in Interface Builder using IBPlugins

June 2009

• Verifying that a string contains an email address using NSPredicate
• Revisiting an old post: Streaming and playing an MP3 stream
• Method names in Objective-C
• Base64 encoding options on the Mac and iPhone

May 2009

• Simple methods for date formatting and transcoding
• Intercepting status bar touches on the iPhone
• Variable argument lists in Cocoa
• Invoking other processes in Cocoa

April 2009

• Easy custom UITableView drawing
• What does it mean when you assign [super init] to self?
• Showing a "Loading..." message over the iPhone keyboard
• 8 Confusing Objective-C Warnings and Errors

March 2009

• Using NSKeyedArchiver to archive a C linked-list
• Recreating UITableViewController to increase code reuse
• Scripted window management in Xcode
• An Asteroids-style game in CoreAnimation, Part Four.
• An Asteroids-style game in CoreAnimation, Part Three.

February 2009

• An Asteroids-style game in CoreAnimation, Part Two.
• An Asteroids-style game in CoreAnimation, Part One.
• Breadth-first traversal of a graph of Objective-C objects
• Interprocess communication: snooping, intercepting and subverting

January 2009

• Multiple virtual pages in a UIScrollView with just 2 child views
• Demystifying NSApplication by recreating it
• Multiple row selection and editing in a UITableView
• Serving an NSManagedObjectContext over an NSConnection

December 2008

• Heterogeneous cells in a UITableViewController
• OrderedDictionary: Subclassing a Cocoa class cluster
• Drawing a custom window on Mac OS X
• Instance variable to synthesized property (an Xcode user script)

November 2008

• Method invocation formatting styles in Objective-C
• Automated user interface testing on the iPhone
• Singletons, AppDelegates and top-level data.
• Simplifying your code using NSDictionary

October 2008

• Using libxml2 for XML parsing and XPath queries in Cocoa
• Debugging tips for Objective-C programming
• Synthesizing a touch event on the iPhone
• WorldTimeConverter: Dates and timezones in Cocoa
• Sliding UITextFields around to avoid the keyboard

September 2008

• Streaming and playing an MP3 stream
• A Cocoa application driven by HTTP data
• Drawing gloss gradients in CoreGraphics
• Parametric acceleration curves in Core Animation

August 2008

• Application Design in AppKit
• Safely fetching an NSManagedObject by URI
• In defense of Objective-C 2.0 Properties
• NSArray or NSSet, NSDictionary or NSMapTable
• String philosophies: char arrays, std::string and NSString

July 2008

• Key Value Information
• Better integration for NSViewController and NSView
• CoreGraphics curves and lines: a sample app
• NSMapTable: more than an NSDictionary for weak pointers

June 2008

• Hidden Xcode build, debug and template settings
• Doing things in Cocoa with "nil"
• Speed test: NSManagedObject ObjC-2.0 accessors
• Five approaches to listening, observing and notifying in Cocoa.

May 2008

• Adapter interfaces in Objective-C, using categories.
• Implementing countByEnumeratingWithState:objects:count:
• Objective-C 2.0: Fast enumeration clarifications
• Square Root: Numerical fun with NSDecimalNumber
• Open the previous document on application startup

April 2008

• Propagate deletes immediately in Core Data
• viewWillDraw - a welcome addition to NSView in 10.5
• Type punning isn't funny: Using pointers to recast in C is bad.
• The value of immutable values

March 2008

• Supersequent implementation
• Testing Core Data with very big hierarchical data sets
• Construct an NSInvocation for any message, just by sending
• Cocoa Application Startup
• Break into Debugger
• Core Data: one line fetch

February 2008

• IMP of the current method