Invoke any Method on any Thread
I previously wrote a blog post titled Performing any Selector on the Main Thread detailing a convenience category on NSInvoication for easily creating invocation objects that could be invoked on…
Auto-incrementing Build Numbers in Xcode
Users and testers will find bugs you are sure you have already fixed. Sometimes they use the wrong version, sometimes your fix is not as good as you thought. Either…
The state of iOS Open Source – and what to do about it!
There is a vibrant community of open source projects for iOS. You need a calendar UI components or a JSON parser? No problem, the projects are out there. Most code…
Sync-Async Pair Pattern – Easy concurrency on iOS
Apple provides many tools for implementing concurrency in your application. NSOperationQueue, GCD, or simply using performSelectorInBackground:withObject: that is available on each and every object, are just some examples. The tools…
Automated Testing is Like Optimizing
I have my roots in the Atari demo scene, so I know the joys of optimizing the inner-loop of a software texture mapper down to the last assembly instruction. The…
Exceptions and Errors on iOS
Cocoa, and by inheritance Cocoa Touch on iOS makes a clear distinction between what is an exception, and what is an error in your application. This should be obvious since…
Localizations from NIB files
Cocoa Touch have good support for localizations. Pretty much any file can be localized, including NIB-files with user interface layouts. Unfortunately a NIB-file is an atomic file. So if you…
Future Cocoa Operation
In Java you have for quite some time had the Future interface for encapsulating an asynchronous calculation. Cocoa has had the abstract NSOperation class to encapsulate asynchronous operations. NSOperation do…
UIWebView and JavaScript Woes
JavaScript Core is unfortunately not a public framework on iOS, leaving us at the mercy of the UIWebView class if we want to execute JavaScript in our applications. I have…
Rewriting a Public Cocoa Touch API
Cocoa Touch added API for presenting a view controller in a popup bubble in iPhone OS 3.2, the responsible class is named UIPopoverController. One would guess that this new class…
Performing any Selector on the Main Thread
Many UI frameworks, including AppKit for Mac OS X and UIKit for iPhone OS, require that all methods to UI components are sent on the main UI thread. Cocoa and…
iPad, the Future, and the Luxury of Starting Over
A luxury that you seldom have in the world of software development is the luxury of starting over. I am not talking about throwing away everything and start from scratch.…
Learn to Stop Worrying and Love the Singleton
Enterprise applications and mobile applications have quite different requirements. Starting an enterprise application is just something you do once before it continue running for months or years. On the other…
Google Translate and iPhone apps
The Cocoa and Cocoa Touch frameworks has a really nice function for acquiring a localized string NSLocalizedString(). Just pass in a key and you are done, for strings that are…
Add some polish to iPhone app start up
First impressions last, and the very first impression your users have of your iPhone application is the start up. First step is to have a nice Default.png, but not many…