Cocoa with Love

CoreGraphics curves and lines: a sample app

Jul 12, 2008 (an Objective-C era article)

This is a small application which shows the basic CoreGraphics line drawing primitives. Includes mouse editable control points to manipulate the primitives graphically.

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NSMapTable: more than an NSDictionary for weak pointers

Jul 6, 2008 (an Objective-C era article)

NSMapTable is collection class that was introduced in Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard). At first glance, it would appear to be most useful as an NSDictionary replacement that can choose between "strong" and "weak" pointers. In this post, I'll show you why it is also useful outside garbage collection and how it can do things that NSDictionary can't (or shouldn't) do.

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Hidden Xcode build, debug and template settings

Jun 28, 2008 (an Objective-C era article)

This is a collection of the most useful hidden and hard-to-find settings in Xcode related to building, debugging and file templates.

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Doing things in Cocoa with "nil"

Jun 21, 2008 (an Objective-C era article)

"nil" is a pointer to nothing. Here are some useful things that you can do with that pointer to nothing in Objective-C and Cocoa.

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Speed test: NSManagedObject ObjC-2.0 accessors

Jun 13, 2008 (an Objective-C era article)

A quick, relative-performance test of the 3 ways of accessing NSManagedObject properties in Leopard.

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Five approaches to listening, observing and notifying in Cocoa.

Jun 7, 2008 (an Objective-C era article)

Here are five different ways to implement the Observer design pattern (sometimes called Broadcaster/Listener, Publish/Subscribe or Notifications) in Objective-C and some reasons why each approach can be valuable.

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Adapter interfaces in Objective-C, using categories.

May 24, 2008 (an Objective-C era article)

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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Implementing countByEnumeratingWithState:objects:count:

May 19, 2008 (an Objective-C era article)

If you want to use fast enumeration on your own classes, you must implement
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Objective-C 2.0: Fast enumeration clarifications

May 15, 2008 (an Objective-C era article)

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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Square Root: Numerical fun with NSDecimalNumber

May 9, 2008 (an Objective-C era article)

NSDecimalNumber is a powerful Foundation class that holds high precision base 10 numbers. The default class only provides basic arithmetic operators, leaving you to write any advanced operations that you need. This is an example that implements a square root using NSDecimalNumber.

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