One of the thrills of software development is how much power is placed into the hands, literally, of a single engineer. Software takes work, and lots of it. But thanks to frameworks of reusable code, individuals are consistently able to “outbuild” the work of our predecessors, while exerting the same or less effort. Consider the work […]

I haven’t used Apple’s Core Data framework all that much, but I’m trying to dabble more in it with newer projects where I don’t rely as much on legacy data storage, or am willing to take the hit of migrating from those legacy persistence models. As a developer, the obvious upside to using Core Data […]

Jeff LaMarche presents a rundown on whether Objective-C dealloc implementations should bother nil’ing out an instance variable after releasing it. LaMarche offers a fairly balanced presentation of the two sides, but in my opinion he gives too much credibility to the argument that nil’ing is a good idea. He essentially embraces the argument that nil’ing […]

I’ve been in and out of Apple’s iPhone simulator for the past two years, and for the entire time, I’ve been frustrated by what I assumed was an inherent limitation: pinching and zooming and only works in the middle of the screen: Today I was so supremely frustrated by this that I played around with […]