Archive for the 'Xcode' Category

Abusing Objective C With Class

Thursday, April 12th, 2007

Dynamic messaging is one of the nifty features of Cocoa and Objective-C programming on the Mac. You don’t have to know which class, or even which method your code will call until runtime. The feature is utilized a great deal by the delegation pattern employed by most standard classes in AppKit. For instance, when a […]

Hexy Little Thing

Wednesday, February 14th, 2007

I’m working on an application now that uses a custom document format. Since my code manipulates this format and spits it back out to disk, I find myself frequently examining the resulting documents using Peter Ammon’s excellent Hex Fiend to examine the resulting files, and make sure the content is still format-compliant. But while I’m […]

Xcode Pasteboard Accumulator

Thursday, February 1st, 2007

Way back in the MPW days, I used to rely heavily on an extension for the IDE that put powerful pasteboard manipulation tools in the window header. Essentially these tools let you treat your pasteboard like a stack, so you could easily accumulate multiple copies and then paste them all out at once. For some […]

Xcode Index

Thursday, January 25th, 2007

If you use Xcode often, surely you appreciate the “Code Sense Index.” This is the magic cache of symbolic info that allows tricks like command-double-clicking a variable name to jump to its declaration, or Opt-Period to complete a function name. Indexing makes life for programmers about one bajillion times easier. Unless. Ughh!!!!! Angst, angst, angst! […]