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][1] and [tests for interfaces using Cocoa bindings][2]. 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’ve occasionally been asked about the appropriate form for properties representing to-many relationships in Objective-C 2.0. Let’s start with the example of a recipe and its ingredients, represented by instances of the Recipe and Ingredient classes. @interface Recipe : NSObject { @private NSMutableSet *_ingredients; } @property (copy) NSSet *ingredients; @end This is a pretty straightforward […]
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 […]
I listened to a recent episode of the [cocoaFusion:][1] podcast about properties and dot notation today. There were a few interesting points brought up, but I felt a couple of the most important reasons to use `@property` declarations and dot notation weren’t addressed. The biggest reason I see to use a different notation for both […]
As of today, I’ve been with Apple for five years, working on developer tools. It’s been great and I look forward to many more years of improving the experience for people creating great Mac and iPhone software!
In a few weeks, it will be **four years** since Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger was first released. That was the first release to include Core Data. It will also be about **one and a half years** since Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard was released, with significant enhancements to the Core Data API. It’s pretty […]
Saturday, September 27, 2008
There was a question recently on Stack Overflow asking how to handle cross-model relationships in managed object models. Now, the poster wasn’t asking about how to handle relationships across persistent stores — he was asking how to handle splitting a model up into pieces such that the pieces could be recombined. It turns out that […]
I didn’t write [Carrie’s Dots][1] — but I did download it! It was written by [Dr. Chris Hanson][2], a Chris Hanson who’s evidently still in the mid-South. Maybe the next time I get a chance to visit Mississippi, we’ll get to meet up! [1]: http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=286047207&mt=8 [2]: http://dr-chris.org/
What’s wrong with this code? – (void)registerForNotificationsFromTask:(NSTask *)task ( { [[NSNotificationCenter defaultCenter] addObserver:self selector:@selector(taskDidTerminateNotification:) name:@”NSTaskDidTerminateNotification” object:task]; } If you didn’t notice anything wrong, look again. What’s bad about this is that it’s passing a **string literal** instead of a **global variable** for the notification name. The code should really look like this: – (void)registerForNotificationsFromTask:(NSTask *)task […]