Category Archives: iPhone

One of the prettiest built-in views on the iPhone is the UIPickerView, which presents a slot-machine-like list of options. Unfortunately, this view isn’t particularly easy to use, as its default presentation takes up quite a bit of screen real-estate, and … Continue reading →

Yesterday, we discussed loading a (mutable) plist from disk. To review: there are built-in Cocoa functions that load plists, but they return immutable data structures. (Happily, Core Foundation functions exist that can create mutable plists from XML files.) Suppose you … Continue reading →

Property Lists, or plists, are collections of strings, numbers, booleans, dates, base64 data, arrays, and dictionaries (associative arrays). They are a standardized, flexible data structure used (among other places) throughout Mac OS X. Plists are stored as XML files on … Continue reading →

Some posts are of general interest, some are more narrow in their focus. This is a small post, on a specific question, to which I don’t even have all the answers. But if you’re working with Cocoa on the iPhone, … Continue reading →

Today, something pretty simple: An implementation of a threadsafe queue in Cocoa/Objective-C, suitable for use when implementing the producer-consumer pattern. Nothing too extraordinary: I use an NSMutableArray to store the data (object ids) and the pthreads library for synchronization.

I’ve been using a Mac Mini (2.0GHz Core 2 Duo/1GB memory) for iPhone development. Mostly, it’s great, but it is a little low on memory. It always seems to have enough to run whatever I’m using at the moment w/o … Continue reading →

When writing multithreaded Cocoa apps (on Mac OS X or on iPhone OS) it’s necessary to consider the “run loop(s)” of your application. Run loops are the message pumps which drive (among other things) all the parts of your application … Continue reading →

Today, just three quick notes on iPhone development, Objective-C, and Cocoa. Briefly: The iPhone has no true fixed-width font NSMutableArray isn’t really anything like an array NSNumber lets you wrap integers and floats as objects

When setting up Xcode to use Subversion (SVN) as its Source Code Management (SCM) system for a new project, I encountered a few hiccups. Nothing too major, and I’m sure that some of them were due to my unfamiliarity with … Continue reading →

Today, some random notes on Xcode (Apple’s IDE for Mac OS and iPhone OS): A few odds and ends I’ve noticed since starting to work with it a couple of weeks ago. (I like Xcode, but it does seem to … Continue reading →