Eschatology

A couple weeks back, I tweeted the following: Turns out a Raspberry Pi now is about 6× as fast as a SPARCstation 20 was 20 years ago. And a Pi 2 is more like 15× as fast. I was a little low in my numbers, too — they’re more like 7× and 16× to 41× […]

Mac OS X has a number of concurrency mechanisms, and that increases with Snow Leopard. In addition to run loops, threads (both Cocoa and POSIX) and operations, Snow Leopard adds Grand Central Dispatch (GCD), a very lightweight way to represent units of work and the style of concurrency they need, and have the system figure […]

The Big Nerd Ranch weblog has a new post about Objective-C 2.0 dot notation. They advocate never using it and they’re completely wrong. Given my reaction on Twitter, several people have asked me to write a more in-depth rebuttal. I’ve already addressed when and why you should use Objective-C 2.0 properties and dot notation in […]

In the past, I’ve talked about ways to easily write unit tests for Cocoa applications, including tests for user interfaces using target-action and tests for interfaces using Cocoa bindings. There are some strategies you can apply to make writing tests for Cocoa code even easier, though. They’re just straightforward object-oriented programming, but sometimes we can […]

I’ll preface this post with the standard advice: Don’t create singletons if you don’t absolutely have to. In general, if you’re creating a global “manager” object of some sort, you’re doing something wrong. That said, there’s still occasionally a reason to have such a global singleton, such as a “default something.” The sample code in […]