Articles about Swift, Cocoa, software design and programming.
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.
Invoking other processes is a good way to handle some low-level tasks on the Mac. I'll show you some simple ways to invoke processes and parse their outputs in Cocoa apps as well as some advanced tricks like running a process with administrator privileges.
It is really easy to customize your UITableViews. I'll show you how to completely customize the appearance of UITableViews without overriding or subclassing and without the need for any tricky hackery.
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.
The "Text" (SMS) application on the iPhone uses a custom, semi-transparent view to show its "Sending..." message over the keyboard. I'll show you a simple class that can display semi-transparent loading messages and how you can display messages over the keyboard.
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.
NSKeyedArchiver provides some support for archiving C primitive types but provides no support for pointers to C structs. I'll show you how you can archive a linked list of C structs, despite the lack of support in NSKeyedArchiver.
UITableViewController and UIViewController are the two most commonly implemented controllers on the iPhone. It may not always be clear what UITableViewController adds to its superclass. I'll show you what UITableViewController does by recreating its functionality on top of UIViewController and show you why doing this can provide a richer base controller class that you can use throughout your iPhone application.
Xcode's placement of windows and views has never entirely satisfied me. In this post, I'll show you a series of Applescripts that I use to create my own arrangement of Xcode windows so that I can choose where different kinds of documents are placed and reorganize the layout of windows with basic key commands.
Over the last three weeks, I presented a simple 2D game using CoreAnimation. For the final post in this series, I'll look at CATransactions and why I didn't use them in the game to handle animations and I'll look at the performance of CoreAnimation as numbers of CALayers and sizes of CALayers change.
