Author:
Mark Dalrymple
Last time we took at look at some of the data you can ask an object and its class about, stuff like a the signature of a method, as well as an application using NSInvocation. This time it’s a look at some of the methods you can use to interrogate an object.…
Author:
Paul Turner
I was one of five lucky Nerds who got to attend Apple’s WWDC this year, and it has been a blast so far. The keynote was probably the most exciting in terms of the big-picture changes coming from Apple. Interestingly enough, the big picture means focusing on the little things.…
Author:
Step Christopher
Depending upon your perspective as a developer, you may have been disappointed by the relative lack of developer-focused information in the WWDC 2013 keynote. I was not.
As a developer, I’m working toward the same goal that Apple is: to delight people and improve their lives.…
Author:
Mark Dalrymple
Last time we took a look at the motivations behind Objective-C message sending. It’s a layer of indirection that lets one chunk of code treat other, perhaps unrelated, chunks of code in a uniform manner. “I have a pile of views here, I shall draw them all with -drawRect:, and I don’t care if the views are Buttons, Sliders, or World Maps.” There’s a loop that hits a collection and sends the same message to a bunch of objects:
for (NSView *view in visibleviews) {
[view drawRect: view.bounds];
}
Objective-C performs this magic by having a collection associated with each object.…
Author:
John Shea
Editor’s note: John Shea is a two-time Big Nerd Ranch alum and is the creator of Kondrian, an action game for iPhone and iPad.
Alumni: If you’d like to share your success stories with us, please leave a note in the comments.…
Author:
Mark Dalrymple
What is something that we use every day as a Mac or iOS programmer? Objective-C. What do we use every day in Objective-C? Those square brackets. How many times a day do you type something like this?
[someObject doSome:stuff for:reasons];
Ever wondered what’s really happening inside those square brackets?…
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
Instruments is a cool tool. There is a lot it can do beyond “simple” things like profiling your application’s execution time or finding your memory leaks. It can also give you holistic views of the activity on a device, such as power consumption.…
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.…