A coworker sent me a link to this posting on the state of libraries on iOS. I sent back a quick reply, with the intent to write a blog post on the subject later. I’ve since decided that this replay says almost everything I wanted to say, so I decided to just edit it a […]
Author archives: Steve
Change back button title
When you’re using a navigation controller, the title of the back button on a particular view controller is pulled from the view it leads to. Although this can be initially confusing, this actually makes a lot of sense. If two different view controllers (say, Circles and Squares) might push the same view controller (Details), shouldn’t […]
Empathy in pricing
I don’t know much about pricing products as a developer. While I’m a programmer, I don’t have apps of my own yet. So take this with a grain of salt, go ahead and flame me, etc. These are just my feelings. But nevertheless, I wanted to share how I feel about pricing as a user […]
Check your thread
When you start using Grand Central Dispatch or NSOperation, you’ll want to perform some actions on the main thread and some intentionally off the main thread. This is a simple and obvious technique, but it took me a while to adopt it: You can do by asserting with NSAssert or NSCAssert for [NSThread isMainThread], just […]
Presenting BlockAssert
Assertions are a great tool. As an Objective-C programmer, I use NSAssert and NSCAssert liberally. For various reasons, you sometimes can’t use NSAssert in a block easily. I’m going to explain why and describe a new macro, BlockAssert, which solves this.
Against GCC_WARN_SHADOW
Over the years I have tweaked which compiler warnings I use. There’s one in particular that I used to turn on but will turn off from now on: GCC_WARN_SHADOW. GCC_WARN_SHADOW is essentially drawing your attention to you possibly doing something other than you intended. This is like most warnings, but the difference is that the […]
C99 initializers
You probably know CGRectMake, but did you know it’s not the only way to make rectangles? It’s not even the best way, really. There’s also C99 initializer syntax. The main advantage to the C99 syntax is that it gives you some very Objective-C like syntax, where the fields are close to the values rather than […]
Why you should use instancetype instead of id
In my previous entry, I discussed when id will be promoted to instancetype. But now that I’ve explained this, I’d like to explain why you should understand this but not rely on it. Instead, you should use instancetype directly. Let me start with this bold statement, then I’ll back up and explain it: Use instancetype […]
When is id promoted to instancetype?
instancetype is a special type that can be returned from an Objective-C method. It specifies that the return is an object of the same type as the receiving class. In some cases, the compiler promotes an id return to an instancetype: For instance, despite the definition of [[NSString alloc] init], the compiler knows that it […]
A primer on @property and dot syntax
Properties were new in Objective-C 2.0, introduced in 2006. While pretty uncontroversial, along with them came dot syntax. Dot syntax is much more controversial. In this article, I’ll discuss the advantages of @property which make it worth using, and discuss “dot syntax.”