APPropriate Behaviour
The book about all the things software writers do that aren't writing software.
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Category Archives: Mac
On switching to Linux
In November, I switched to GNU/Linux at home (I still use OS X at work, because I still write Objective-C in Xcode at work). Or rather, I switched back: I’d been using it around a decade ago. In December, I … Continue reading
Posted in advancement of the self, GNU, Mac
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ClassBrowser: warts and all
I previously gave a sneak peak of ClassBrowser, a dynamic execution environment for Objective-C. It’s not anything like ready for general use (in fact it can’t really do ObjC very well at all), but it’s at the point where you … Continue reading
Posted in C++, code-level, Mac, OOP, software-engineering, TDD, tool-support
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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
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A two-dimensional dictionary
What? A thing I made has just been open-sourced by my employers at Agant: the AGTTwoDimensionalDictionary works a bit like a normal dictionary, except that the keys are CGPoints meaning we can find all the objects within a given rectangle. … Continue reading
Posted in code-level, iPad, iPhone, Mac, OOP, performance, software-engineering
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On community
This is a post that had been boiling for a while; I talked a little about the topic when I was in Appsterdam earlier this year, and had a few more thoughts which were completely supplanted and rearranged by watching
Posted in AAPL, advancement of the self, books, Business, iDeveloper.TV, iPhone, Mac, NSConf, OOP, Responsibility, software-engineering, Talk, WebObjects
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Messing about with Clang
I’ve been reading the Smalltalk-80 blue book (pdf) recently, and started to wonder what a Smalltalk style object browser for Objective-C would look like. Not just from the perspective of presenting the information that makes up Objective-C classes in novel … Continue reading
Posted in code-level, Mac, software-engineering, tool-support
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The debugger of royalty
We’ve all got little libraries of code or scripts that help us with debugging. Often these are for logging information in a particular way, or wrapping logs/tests such that they’re only invoked in Debug builds but not in production. Or … Continue reading
Posted in code-level, iPad, iPhone, Mac, TDiOSD
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Why we don’t trust -retainCount
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
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On explaining stuff to people
An article that recently made the rounds, though it was written back in September, is called Apple’s Idioten Vektor. It’s a discussion of how the CCCrypt() function in Apple’s CommonCrypto library, when used in its default cipher block chaining mode, … Continue reading
Posted in books, Crypto, documentation, Encryption, iPad, iPhone, Mac, PCAS
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On the new Lion security things
This post will take a high-level view of some of Lion’s new security features, and examine how they fit (or don’t) in the general UNIX security model and with that of other platforms. App sandboxing The really big news for … Continue reading
Posted in Authentication, Authorization, Codesign, Mac, PCAS, sandbox
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