Back in the dark old days of Commodore 64 and its brethren computers were pretty much all synchronous; instructions executed one after the other, one at a time. It was a simpler time. Users did expect a responsive UI during slow operations or so I have been told....
Programming Pitfalls: Bit in the ARC
Apple’s ARC (automatic reference counting) for Mac and iOS devices is intended to make Cocoa development easier. For the most part it does. However, in using it I have encountered a bit of a pitfall: by default the compiler does not optimize your code in debugging but...
Programming Pitfalls: NSAutorelease Pools on iOS 4.X
iOS 5 has brought a lot of quality of life improvements in terms of memory management and the general iOS development workflow, assuming you are on the latest tooling. However, nothing is free and there seems to be a little bit of a pitfall that you might hit if you...
Know Your Class: How to Determine an Object’s Class in Objective-C
Programming in Objective-C is a pleasure. Its dynamic messaging systems allows us to do a lot of little messaging tricks that we could not do in other languages. However, when it comes down to it Objective-C code will crash if you send a message to an object that does...
AppCode VS XCode
I hate XCode but really want to love it. Most Cocoa developers have had more than a few bad experiences with XCode where it has crashed more than once in a day, magically, lost track of files, failed to warn you of naming conflicts in assets, or simply dead-locked...
Simply Loading TableViewCells from a Nib
UITableViews drive a significant portion of iOS apps. Apple has provided some pretty great tools for developing decent looking apps based on them, but there are times when you might want to do something a little more stylish than what iOS provides. That’s when you...
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