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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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! […]