Category Archives: code-level

Adding components to a GNUstep web / WebObjects app

Posted on 2012-03-28 by Graham

In WebObjects, Components take the role of a view controller in what passes for Cocoa’s version of MVC. Each is responsible for calculating the data that the view objects are bound to: you saw an example of this in the … Continue reading →

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Confine ALL the things!

Posted on 2012-03-23 by Graham

I was talking with Saul Mora at lunchtime about NSManagedObjectContext thread confinement. We launched into an interesting thought experiment: what if every object ran on its own thread? This would be interesting. You can never use a method that returns … Continue reading →

Posted in code-level, software-engineering | 4 Comments

How to TDD with CATCH

Posted on 2012-03-13 by Graham

Plenty of people have asked me about the TDD framework I use. While the book Test-Driven iOS Development has code using OCUnit (for pragmatic, and previously-covered, reasons); I am currently more frequently to be discovered using Phil Nash’s CATCH framework. … Continue reading →

Posted in code-level, software-engineering, TDD | 1 Comment

Why we don’t trust `-retainCount`

Posted on 2012-02-23 by Graham

I’m pretty sure @bbum must have worn through a few keyboards telling users of StackOverflow not to rely on the value of an Objective-C object’s -retainCount. Why? When we create an object, it has a retain count of 1, right? … Continue reading →

Posted in code-level, Foundation, iPad, iPhone, Mac | Comments Off

Is it an anti-pattern to use properties everywhere?

Posted on 2012-02-17 by Graham

I’ve seen questions about whether to always provide accessors for ivars, and recommendations, such as in akosma software’s ObjC code standards, that say Whenever possible, do not specify ivars in the header file; use only @property and @synthesize statements instead. … Continue reading →

Posted in code-level | 10 Comments

Building an object-oriented dispatch system in Objective-C

Posted on 2012-02-09 by Graham

iTunes was messing about rebuilding the device I was trying to use for development, so I had time over lunch to write a new message dispatch system in the Objective-C language. “But wait,” you say, “Objective-C already has a message … Continue reading →

Posted in code-level, OOP, Uncategorized | Comments Off

On home truths in iOS TDD

Posted on 2012-02-07 by Graham

The first readers of Test-Driven iOS Development (currently available in Rough Cuts form on Safari Books Online: if you want to buy a paper/kindle/iBooks editions, you’ll have to wait until it enters full production in a month or so) are … Continue reading →

Posted in books, code-level, TDD, tool-support | 7 Comments

On SSL Pinning for Cocoa [Touch]

Posted on 2011-12-07 by Graham

Moxie Marlinspike, recently-acquired security boffin at Twitter, blogged about SSL pinning. The summary is that relying on the CA trust model to validate SSL certificates introduces some risk into using an app – there are hundreds of trusted roots in … Continue reading →

Posted in code-level, iPad, iPhone, ssl | 6 Comments

So you don’t like your IDE

Posted on 2011-09-02 by Graham

There are many different tools for writing Objective-C code, though of course many people never stray much beyond the default that’s provided by their OS vendor. Here are some of the alternatives I’ve used: this isn’t an in-depth review of … Continue reading →

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TDD/unit testing video training for iOS developers

Posted on 2011-07-18 by Graham

I recently recorded a series of videos on unit testing and test-driven development for iOS developers with Scotty of iDeveloper.tv. The videos and associated source code is now available for purchase and download.

Posted in code-level, iDeveloper.TV, iPad, iPhone, software-engineering, Talk, TDD, tool-support | Comments Off