Category Archives: gnustep

Conflicts in my mental model of Objective-C

My worldview as it relates to the writing of software in Objective-C contains many items that are at odds with one another. I either need to resolve them or to live with the cognitive dissonance, gradually becoming more insane as … Continue reading

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Garbage-collected Objective-C

When was a garbage collector added to Objective-C? If you follow Apple’s work with the language, you might be inclined to believe that it was in 2008 when AutoZone was added as part of Objective-C 2.0 (the AutoZone collector has … Continue reading

Posted in academia, architecture of sorts, gnustep, iPad, iPhone, Mac, OOP | Leave a comment

Using GNUstep libraries with Xcode

I was recently asked about building projects that use GNUstep from Xcode. The fact is, it’s incredibly easy. By default, GNUstep on Mac OS X installs its libraries to /usr/local/lib and its frameworks to /Library/Frameworks. Therefore if you want to … Continue reading

Posted in code-level, gnustep, tool-support | 1 Comment

Cocoa Memory Management

It becomes evident, thanks to the mass centralisation of the neverending september effect that is stackoverflow, that despite the large number of electrons expended on documenting the retain/release/autorelease reference counting mechanism for managing memory in Cocoa, Cocoa Touch, UIKit, AppKit, … Continue reading

Posted in cocoa, FAQ, gnustep, iPhone, leopard, memory, nextstep, objc, openstep | 3 Comments

better security, not always more security

Today’s investigative investigations have taken me to the land of Distributed Objects, that somewhat famous implementation of the Proxy pattern used for intra-process, inter-process and inter-machine communication in Cocoa. Well, by people who measure whether it’s a performance hog, rather … Continue reading

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Objective-C NAQs

Never-Asked Questions :-) In Code Complete 2 ยง6.5, Steve McConnell presents a list of class-related design issues that "vary significantly depending on the language". So why don’t we look at them for Objective-C? Especially as I can’t find anyone else … Continue reading

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WWDC day three

Today was not quite a full day, so I managed to spend about an hour or so milling around Yerba Buena park, doing a little gift shopping and generally existing outside of the Mascarpone centre. Also put in another update … Continue reading

Posted in cocoa, gnustep, nextstep, WWDC | 3 Comments

WWDC – day one

The WWDC keynote is always an odd event to attend. It’s put on for the benefit of the investors and the media, with the developers being invited purely to act as braying masses expressing their adulation for His Steveness. It’s … Continue reading

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Little hack to help with testing

Want the ability to switch in different test drivers, mock objects, or other test-specific behaviour? Here’s a pattern I came up with (about a year ago) to do that in a GNUstep test tool, which can readily be used in … Continue reading

Posted in cocoa, gnustep, objc, openstep, test | Leave a comment

Nice things about ObjC

Title linkies to a post by an F-Script guy (the F-Script guy? I’m not sure, I don’t really follow F-Script development) about nice things he likes about the Objective-C language. Remembering that he wrote a Smalltalk scripting environment for Cocoa, … Continue reading

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