July 2011
1 post
Moved!
I have moved to a new address.
December 2010
7 posts
Objective-C Memory Management & Garbage Collection →
Simple primitives container in Objective-C
Today’s post deals with a small pet-peeve I have with ObjC so far: using NSArray to store primitives (wrapped and unwrapped via NSNumbers) is rather cumbersome. Using malloc‘ed arrays is also inconvenient to pass around between objects, since they are not reference-counted and don’t carry their length with them.
After reading this article about emulating templates with C...
Data visualization in Cocoa
Probably one of the best advantages of an interactive GUI for scientific programs is the ability to visualize data in real time. While you could as well output a full dump of your data and plot with an external program, there is great pleasure in exploring how your model reacts to mucking and futzing around with the parameter space.
In the Systemic Console program (above), I wrote a flexible...
1 tag
Pay No Attention to the Runtime Behind the Curtain →
You can get a good idea of the complexity of the Objective-C runtime behind the scenes by using clang with the -rewrite-objc option. This simple line to allocate and initialize an NSArray with a few NSString literals
keysArray = [[NSArray alloc] initWithObjects:@"period", @"mass", @"meanAnomaly", @"eccentricity", @"longPeri", nil];
would become something like this ungodly mess, if there were a...
Cocoa Bindings Examples →
Cocoa for Scientists | MacResearch →
2 tags
Exercise of the day: Using NSOperation,...
As I mentioned in my introductory post, I am working on the overall design of a native Cocoa port of the Systemic Console (currently a Java/Swing application). This involves carefully thinking about what some of the core needs will be and which of the core libraries (frameworks) will address them. Therefore, every few days I will talk briefly about what class/library I am learning for a particular...
Cocoa coding guidelines
Introduction to Coding Guidelines for Cocoa
Cocoa Style for Objective-C (part 2)
Google Objective-C Style Guide
November 2010
5 posts
1 tag
Cocoa Core competencies →
This guide from the Reference Library lists the core competencies for Cocoa. Going through them to check I understand each one of them to a good degree.
WatchFoundations of Objective-C (via iDeveloper TV).
KVC is pretty awesome. →
4 tags
NSLog(@"Hello world!")
I am a long-time Java and C++ developer on the Mac, and have been developing Swing desktop applications for quite a while. Most of the applications I have worked on have coincided with my academic interests. The Systemic Console has been one such projects: it started out as a small Java 1.4 applet more than six years ago, and evolved through several iterations of the Apple JVM. On the way, it...
