Archive for the 'Ideas' Category

Easy Features

Thursday, July 30th, 2009

Brent Simmons writes on the Anatomy Of A Feature, using his recent work in NetNewsWire to add support for the popular Instapaper service: It’s tempting to think that adding a feature like this is just about adding the functionality — but there’s a bunch more to it than that. Here you see the gory, deliberate […]

Invest In Yourself

Friday, November 28th, 2008

I made an offhand quip on the latest Core Intuition podcast, that in light of the recent stock market plunge, I should have invested money into my own company instead of the likes of Yahoo and Apple. I was (mostly) joking, but there’s a philosophical truth in there. All of us have lately learned, or […]

Building A Bigger Nerd Ranch

Friday, September 26th, 2008

When newcomers to programming on the Mac ask me for advice about getting started with Cocoa, I usually boil it down to three steps, depending on the amount of time and money they are prepared to put into the task: If you’re the slightest bit curious, buy Mark Dalrymple and Scott Knaster’s affordable book, Learn […]

Add Meaning To Key Value Strings

Tuesday, May 22nd, 2007

Fraser Speirs recently tweeted some comments about strings in code: “I think that I particularly hate strings in code that have programmatic meaning. I’m looking at you, KVC. And you, KVO.” Reading this was one of those “yeah, that sucks!” moments, and it got me thinking about how the situation might be improved. The problem […]