Author:
Mikey Ward
Today we’re going to look at using Objective-C’s array and dictionary subscripting syntax with older iOS and OS X versions.
If you haven’t already, I can’t recommend enough reading Part 1 and Part 2 of Mark Dalrymple’s excellent two-part series about Objective-C’s literal/boxing/subscripting syntax.…
Author:
Mark Dalrymple
So. That Clash of the Coders Thing. Kind of nice being able to flex mental muscles over a 72-hour sleep-deprived Dr Pepper-infused period of time, performing acts of violence upon the Objective-C runtime, UIApplication, and the layer stack. It was a blast being able to use all my platform knowledge with the express purpose of subverting it.…
Author:
Mark Dalrymple
I was hanging out on the #macdev IRC channel on Freenode the other day when someone asked a question: “static has different meanings based on the context it is placed in, right?”. Indeed, it has different meaning. And yet it’s the same.…
Author:
Mark Dalrymple
You can find all sorts of interesting and useful stuff in Apple’s header files. Don’t be afraid to explore them. I usually troll through the headers when a new major SDK version comes out (like IOS 7 probably will be this year) to see what’s new.…
Author:
LeAnn Boucher
One More Thing writer spends a week at bootcamp, sharing his journey
Jan David Hanrath, co-founder of One More Thing, a popular blog serving the Dutch Apple community, spent a week at Big Nerd Ranch Europe bootcamp to become an iOS developer.…
Author:
Mark Dalrymple
Fast Enumeration, part 1 covered what fast enumeration is. Part 2 covered the method countByEnumeratingState, which is the centerpiece of fast enumeration. This time around there’s actual code which implements a collection that can be fast enumerated, without cheating and falling back on one of Apple’s collections.…
Author:
Mark Dalrymple
Fast Enumeration, part 1 covered what fast enumeration is, NSEnumeration a bit, and introduced adopting fast enumeration in your own classes by doing a simple pass-through to Apple’s collections. This time around it’s time to look deeper at the central Fast Enumeration call, which I’ll refer to as countByEnumeratingState:
- (NSUInteger) countByEnumeratingWithState: (NSFastEnumerationState *) enumerationState
objects: (id __unsafe_unretained []) stackBuffer
count: (NSUInteger) length;
OK.…
Author:
Mark Dalrymple
Fast Enumeration was introduced into Objective-C back in the 10.5 days. It’s the feature that lets you succinctly iterate through a collection:
NSArray *strings =
[NSArray arrayWithObjects: @"greeble", @"bork", @"hoover", nil];
for (NSString *thing in strings) {
NSLog (@"Woo! %@", thing);
}
Back in the moldy old days, we had to use NSEnumerator to do the same thing:
NSEnumerator *enumerator = [strings objectEnumerator];
NSString *thing;
while ((thing = [enumerator nextObject])) {
NSLog (@"woo.…
Author:
Mark Dalrymple
This question came up in an IRC channel the other day: “What’s the best way to set up a property that’s read-only externally, but modifiable inside of the class, so I can use properties or KVC to change it?”
TL;DR: Make readonly in a public @property, make readwrite in a class extension.…
Author:
Mark Dalrymple
__unsafe_unretained. That sounds pretty scary. It’s a new symbol added by ARC that’s used to decorate pointers. It pops up in Xcode’s autocomplete occasionally, and sometimes you see it in code you find on the net. What is it? When would you want to use it?…