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Tag Archives: Mac

Lisa Source Code: Clascal Evolution

Here’s another interesting thing I’ve learned about Clascal and Object Pascal: It went through exactly the same evolution from combining object allocation & initialization to separating them that Objective-C did a decade later! In early 1983 Clascal, classes were expected to implement a New method as a function returning that type, taking zero or more […]

Lisa Source Code: Understanding Clascal

On January 19, Apple and the Computer History Museum released the source code to the Lisa Office System 7/7 version 3.1, including both the complete Office System application suite and the Lisa operating system. (The main components not released were the Workshop environment and its tooling, including the Edit application and the Pascal, COBOL, BASIC, […]

When to use NSOperation vs. GCD

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 […]

Welcome to Snow Leopard!

Last week, Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard was released! Snow Leopard represents a lot of hard work by a lot of folks at Apple and at seeded third-party developers, and it really shows. Now that it’s shipped, I can actually talk about some of the especially cool things this release has for developers.

Rebutting Big Nerd Ranch on Objective-C 2.0 dot notation

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 […]

When to use properties & dot notation

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 […]

Five years!

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!

Go ahead and use Core Data

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 […]

Happy 25, Macintosh!

The Mac is 25 years old today. Happy birthday, Macintosh. You’ve really changed the world.

WWDC 2008

The time is upon us once again — WWDC time! As I have the past few years, I’ll be in San Francisco all week, staying at the Hotel Kabuki in Japantown. And of course, I’ll be around the conference all week — especially in the labs. Come by and say hi, and I’ll be happy […]