Articles about Swift, Cocoa, software design and programming.
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).
Occasionally, you may want a window to look completely different to the standard window styles provided by Apple. This post will show you how to draw a custom window and implement close, resize and drag functionality.
Xcode user scripts take the repetition out of many aspects of programming. To show you how this can work, here's a script I wrote to turn an instance variable into a property (complete with declaration and synthesis) just by selecting the variable and invoking the script.
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.
Automated testing of application user interfaces can be tricky since user interfaces are designed for use by humans not automated tools. The iPhone is particularly challenging since existing tools that aid user interface testing on the Mac are not available. This post will show you a way to run automated, scripted tests on an iPhone app's user interface.
If you require only a single instance of an object in your application, where should it go? How should you control and manage it? Here are some different approaches, their implementations, their strengths and their weaknesses.
Computers programs are good at mindless repetitive tasks, they are not good at broad decision trees. In this post, I will show you a way of eliminating conditionals from your code that are based on program state by using an array of NSDictionary objects to maintain state.
NSXMLDocument is the normal tree-based XML parser in Cocoa. But if you're writing for the iPhone, this class isn't available. Even on the Mac, sometimes you want tree-based parsing without the full overhead of NSXMLDocument. Here's how to use libxml2 to perform tree-based parsing in a Cocoa-friendly way.
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.
The iPhone lacks specific methods to create UIEvent and UITouch objects. I'll show you how to add this functionality so you can write programmatically driven user-interfaces.
