Core Data now officially supports concurrency and I/O in background threads since OS X 10.7 and iOS 5. In the same release, Apple also brought the document architecture to iOS that leverages this new capability of Core Data. However OS X didn’t get the same level of multicore love. In this post, I’ll show you how to create a multi-core supporting document architecture application for OS X.
Behold the Holy Array!
The holy array — like the holy swiss cheese — is an array that’s full of holes. Sometimes they’re called sparse arrays. You can use this kind of arrays instead of dictionaries to save some memory when you know that you’ll only be using small nonnegative integer as keys.
News Anchor for Mac OS X 2.4.6 Beta 3
Apparently enabling garbage collection in News Anchor 2.4.6 Beta 1 did more harm than good. Thus I’m releasing News Anchor 2.4.6 Beta 3 that fixes the issue.
Wrapping C-Style Callbacks with Blocks
Elegantly handle C-style callbacks with Objective-C blocks. Reduce clutter, improve readability, and a really cool way of wrapping those clunky callback style that’s more than 20 years old!
News Anchor 2.4.6 Beta 1 is available
News Anchor 2.4.6 Beta 1 is out and fixes a compatibility issue with a future version of Mac OS X.
HackerSpace.sg: iOS Developer Meetup
Coverage on the iOS Dev Scout event on March 2012 with my commentaries. The primary topics were iOS in-app purchasing and test-driven development.
Sandboxing the PubSub framework
Are you having trouble sandboxing your app for the Mac App Store? I did and here is my experience on sandboxing News Anchor that uses Apple’s PubSub framework and didn’t play well with the sandbox. This cost me a DTS ticket and you will want to pay attention if your app also consumes RSS/ATOM feed data.
Lion’s sandboxing deadline may have been pushed back, but News Anchor came through and met the original date. Bringing News Anchor into the sandbox cost me one of the two precious DTS tickets in my quota, due to the difficulties in getting the PubSub framework to function in the environment. I’d figured I ought to write this out to contribute back to the Mac Developer community.
Supporting Leopard while developing in Snow Leopard
Apparently Apple’s Cocoa method availability documentation is not enough to determine whether something will work on an earlier version of Mac OS X. That is, avoiding 10.6-only methods doesn’t ensure that your application will also work flawlessly in 10.5. As a first-time Mac developer programming an application on Snow Leopard that is also targeted for…
Native iPhone Development 101
My slides about native iPhone development, presented in Singapore PHP User’s Group meet-up.