Cocoa with Love
Matt Gallagher: Cocoa with Love

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Objective-C

  • Jun 30, 2011

    Objective-C era

    A big weakness in Objective-C's weak typing

    We generally assume that we can send any message we want to a variable in our code typed as "id" and Objective-C's dynamic message handling will make the invocation work correctly at runtime. In some rare cases, this assumption is wrong. I'll look at situations where you need to be careful about sending messages to "id" typed variables and a situation where a limitation in the Objective-C language requires a hideous workaround to avoid serious bugs.

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  • Jan 26, 2011

    Objective-C era

    Submitting functionality for a future version of iOS

    A number of websites are reporting that my application, StreamToMe 3.5 was approved with mention of a piece of future iOS functionality. While this was actually the case, it does not mean that Apple have started accepting apps for this new version of iOS.

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  • Sep 20, 2010

    Objective-C era

    Minimalist Cocoa programming

    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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  • Aug 30, 2010

    Objective-C era

    Alternative Objective-C object allocation for large arrays

    In this post, I'll show you how you can create objects without using the standard instance allocation process (either +[NSObject alloc] or class_createInstance()). I'll also explain why you might do this — the benefits and drawbacks to a custom object creation process.

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  • Jul 15, 2010

    Objective-C era

    Is a virtual machine for Cocoa programming inevitable?

    Recent articles by Jesper have re-ignited some discussion about whether Apple might be working on another programming language to replace Objective-C. Neither of these articles closely examined a related but possibly more important question: is Apple planning to move application development to a virtual machine? In this article, I'll look at why I think moving to a virtual machine might happen along with a possible language transition.

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  • May 25, 2010

    Objective-C era

    Handling unhandled exceptions and signals

    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 12, 2010

    Objective-C era

    A look at how malloc works on the Mac

    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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  • Apr 27, 2010

    Objective-C era

    Porting a Mac program to Windows using The Cocotron

    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

    Objective-C era

    Design of a multi-platform app using The Cocotron

    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

    Objective-C era

    Options for porting Objective-C/Cocoa apps to Windows

    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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  • Mar 22, 2010

    Objective-C era

    Dynamic ivars: solving a fragile base class problem

    In the "modern" Objective-C runtime (that's iPhone OS or 64-bit Mac OS X), you can dynamically add ivars (instance variables) to a class without declaring them first. This allows a solution to the common "fragile base class" problem involving ivar layouts. Dynamic ivars can also help data hiding and abstraction and can even create a confusing situation where a base class and a sub class have ivars with the same names that don't refer to the same underlying data.

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  • Mar 10, 2010

    Objective-C era

    Designing a view with Bindings (UITableView on the Mac)

    Bindings are one of the best ways of connecting your view and model on the Mac but due to the layers of abstraction involved — and the fact that they don't exist on other platforms — bindings can seem foreign and confusing. In this post, I'll show a complex view that is traditionally implemented without bindings (the iPhone's UITableView) and show how it might be redesigned for the Mac with bindings.

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  • Jan 25, 2010

    Objective-C era

    5 key-value coding approaches in Cocoa

    Key-value coding (KVC) is a way of decoupling a generic action from the specific properties it may need to act upon. It is most commonly associated with the NSKeyValueCoding protocol but there are a number of other ways to achieve the same effect. In this post, I look at why key-value coding is important and show you 5 different ways — each with their own particular advantages — to implement this pattern.

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  • Jan 17, 2010

    Objective-C era

    What is a meta-class in Objective-C?

    In this post, I look at one of the stranger concepts in Objective-C — the meta-class. Every class in Objective-C has its own associated meta-class but since you rarely ever use a meta-class directly, they can remain enigmatic. I'll start by looking at how to create a class at runtime. By examining the "class pair" that this creates, I'll explain what the meta-class is and also cover the more general topic of what it means for data to be an object or a class in Objective-C.

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  • Jan 11, 2010

    Objective-C era

    Getting the subclasses of an Objective-C class

    Getting the full list of subclasses for a class is a fairly simple task but it requires some uncommon runtime functions which can make the process more difficult. In this post, I look at how a Class is defined in Objective-C and two completely different ways of working out the subclasses.

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  • Oct 25, 2009

    Objective-C era

    Memory and thread-safe custom property methods

    Objective-2.0 property methods are a nice convenience but if you need to override a property implementation — particularly an atomic, retained or copied object setter property — there are some potential bugs you can create if you don't follow the rules carefully. I'll show you the pitfalls and the correct way to implement a property accessor. I'll also show a way to directly invoke hidden runtime functions to let Objective-C perform atomic getting and setting safely for you.

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  • Oct 18, 2009

    Objective-C era

    How blocks are implemented (and the consequences)

    This post is a look at how clang implements blocks and how this implementation leads to a number of strange behaviors including local variables that end up global, Objective-C objects allocated on the stack instead of the heap, C variables that behave like C++ references, Objective-C objects in non-Objective-C languages, copy methods that don't copy and retain methods that don't retain.

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  • Oct 12, 2009

    Objective-C era

    Objective-C's niche: why it survives in a world of alternatives

    Objective-C remains an impediment for many programmers coming to the Mac or iPhone platforms — few programmers have ever experienced it before learning Cocoa, forcing two learning curves at once for new Cocoa developers. How did Apple end up with such a weird language? And for a company known to replace CPU architectures and their entire operating system, why does Apple persist with Objective-C? The answer lies in the methods.

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  • Oct 5, 2009

    Objective-C era

    The ugly side of blocks: explicit declarations and casting.

    Blocks are a welcome addition to C/Objective-C/C++/Objective-C++ with Snow Leopard but they carry with them the worst aspect of Standard C: function pointer declaration and casting syntax. In this post, I'll show you how to understand declarations and casting syntax for blocks and function pointers, even in the worst of scenarios.

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  • Jul 27, 2009

    Objective-C era

    Rules to avoid retain cycles

    Normally in Objective-C, if you follow the basic rule of maintaining a positive retain count for everything you need to hold onto and releasing when you're done, memory management will "just work" — until you create a retain cycle and suddenly no objects in the cycle will ever be freed. In this post, I'll explain retain cycles, common cases where they occur and the solutions to these problems.

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  • Jun 10, 2009

    Objective-C era

    Method names in Objective-C

    Compared to other languages, method names in Objective-C are weird. They're long, they're wordy, they include names for the parameters and they seem to repeat information you can get elsewhere. Despite these apparent negatives, Objective-C method naming can save you time and effort. I'll show you how methods are named so that you can predict them without documentation and understand how methods work and how they use their parameters from their names alone.

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  • May 10, 2009

    Objective-C era

    Variable argument lists in Cocoa

    This week I'll talk about methods that take variable numbers of arguments, also known as variadic methods. I'll show you the Objective-C syntax and implementation, give a quick rundown of the ways that Cocoa classes provide variable argument support and I'll also show you a way to fake va_list parameters to handle Cocoa's variadic method equivalents at runtime.

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  • Apr 18, 2009

    Objective-C era

    What does it mean when you assign [super init] to self?

    One of the strangest pieces of common syntax in Objective-C is the line self = [super init];. Without any explanation, this arrangement raises a few questions. Does this line set the self value for the instance? Is self just a variable like any other? If so, why have it at all? I'll address each of these questions and show how the compiler converts uses of self and method invocations.

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  • Apr 5, 2009

    Objective-C era

    8 Confusing Objective-C Warnings and Errors

    Objective-C's unique syntax results in unique ways of making mistakes. In this post, I look at the compiler warnings and errors GCC outputs when you make mistakes or potential mistakes in your Objective-C syntax and show you how to fix them.

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  • Dec 18, 2008

    Objective-C era

    OrderedDictionary: Subclassing a Cocoa class cluster

    The default Cocoa collection classes are highly capable but there are situations where you may need to override them to alter their functionality. I'll explain when and how you should do this with an example class: OrderedDictionary (an NSMutableDictionary subclass that maintains ordering of its keys).

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  • Nov 29, 2008

    Objective-C era

    Method invocation formatting styles in Objective-C

    While most traits of Objective-C follow consistent styles, method invocation formatting — arguably a defining characteristic of the language — does not. In this post, I'll look at a handful of approaches that different programmers use to format their method invocations and discuss their advantages and disadvantages.

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  • Oct 25, 2008

    Objective-C era

    Debugging tips for Objective-C programming

    This post is about getting extra information from your program at runtime. Xcode and gdb both support a wide range of information access tools — but you need to know that they're there. Here are some Objective-C specific gdb tips and commands that all Cocoa programmers should know.

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  • Aug 16, 2008

    Objective-C era

    In defense of Objective-C 2.0 Properties

    Of all the new features in Objective-C 2.0, none were as controversial as declared properties. Judging from the attacks, much of the controversy stems from a misunderstanding about the role that properties occupy in a class. In this post, I'll explain why properties are useful in Objective-C — and it isn't auto-generated getters and setters or the dot syntax.

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  • Aug 2, 2008

    Objective-C era

    String philosophies: char arrays, std::string and NSString

    Each of the major C variants on the Mac implement character strings in their own way. It is fairly easy to learn the syntax differences between them but a simple API Reference doesn't explain the reasons for implementations: the different philosophies behind the implementations. In this post, I'll go past the 'How' of string differences and instead explain the 'Why' of differences between the three string implementations.

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  • May 24, 2008

    Objective-C era

    Adapter interfaces in Objective-C, using categories.

    The Categories feature of Objective-C lets the programmer add extra sets of methods after compilation, something impossible in most compiled languages. Using this feature, here is an Objective-C variant of the classic "Adapter" design pattern that allows two classes to work closely together, without two-way coupling dependency problems.

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  • May 15, 2008

    Objective-C era

    Objective-C 2.0: Fast enumeration clarifications

    Fast enumeration in Objective-C 2.0 is a doubly useful addition: it results in code that looks better and runs faster. Its documentation though, still contains a few points which are ambiguous or misleading. Here are some clarifications that I've uncovered.

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  • Mar 30, 2008

    Objective-C era

    Supersequent implementation

    Ever wanted to override a method using a category but still invoke the default method from the category? Like invoking the super method on a super class, this example will show you how to invoke any "supersequent" method no matter if its on the super class, the current class or even another category on the current class.

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  • Mar 14, 2008

    Objective-C era

    Cocoa Application Startup

    How does a Cocoa Application start up? Where are the main places to put code so that it gets run on startup? Learn the answers in this series of startup diagrams.

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  • Feb 25, 2008

    Objective-C era

    IMP of the current method

    I wanted to get my new blog started with something that's unlikely to be found anywhere else. This is an obscure hack to access a fundamental piece of Objective-C data.

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