I recently wrote about Easy Programming, my pseudo-methodology for “keeping going” in the face of difficult or tedious tasks. Since then, I’ve observed an aspect of my workflow that, while seemingly among the easiest of tasks, can be the most limiting to my productivity. What is this devastating conundrum? The challenge of naming code. I […]

Apple’s documentation team just keeps getting better and better. Not only is the writing clearer and more connected to real-world applications than it has been in the past, the team seems to be getting prolific! Today they dropped a huge update on their site, including a bunch of brand new titles. The completely new documents: […]

Every good API (or language) should have a fundamental, powerful, impossible to ignore encapsulation of a primary building block in computer programming: the string. Wikipedia defines a string as a “sequence of various simple objects.” Wow! That’s an indulgent definition, but kind of nice in its flexibility. When such a robustness is properly implemented in […]

(Note: The title of this entry is an homage to Aldous Huxley’s classic Doors of Perception.) Most Mac users and many developers don’t realize how extensively windows are used in the composition of the overall UI experience on Mac OS X. In the years since Mac OS X was first released, the basic “Quartz Window” […]