Tom Dalling

Resource Acquisition is Initialisation (RAII) Explained

Tom — Thu, 17 May 2012 08:35:45 +0000

In the competition to make the worst acronym, RAII probably comes second after HATEOS. Nevertheless, it is an important concept because it allows you to write safer code in C++ — a harsh, unforgiving language that is all too happy to help you shoot yourself in the foot. This article will explain exception-safety and common [...]

Adventures Playing SWF Files In OpenGL

Tom — Sun, 11 Mar 2012 04:56:43 +0000

A quick video about what I got up to on the weekend.

When A Café Is Not A Café – A Short Lesson In Unicode Featuring NSString

Tom — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 10:38:31 +0000

Let’s start with two exotic strings (console output is in the code comments): NSString* apples = NSGetFrenchWord(); NSString* oranges = NSGetFrenchWord(); NSLog(@"apples == '%@'", apples); //apples == 'café' NSLog(@"oranges == '%@'", oranges); //oranges == 'café' They look identical, but looks can be deceiving. NSLog(@"isEqual? %@", [apples isEqual:oranges] ? @"YES" : @"NO"); //isEqual? NO NSLog(@"[apples length] [...]

Gotchas With Grand Central Dispatch (libdispatch) And Blocks

Tom — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 07:20:59 +0000

GCD is a nice replacement for the old performSelectorInBackground:withObject: and performSelectorOnMainThread:withObject:waitUntilDone: methods and NSOperation. It’s also a nice supplement to NSThread. However, I think it was over-hyped a little bit by Apple when it was first released. You probably have all these random deadlocks and race conditions and stuff whenever you use multiple threads, but [...]

Const Correctness For NSString (And Pointers In General)

Tom — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 01:38:00 +0000

So you’re implementing a new notification and you want the name to be a constant. Easy, right? const NSString* VTMyNewNotification; If that’s how you do constants, you’re not doing it quite right. Try assign a new value to the alleged constant and watch in horror as the compiler doesn’t stop you. This is because when [...]

How To Set Up A Secure Git Server At Home (OSX)

Tom — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 00:56:30 +0000

In this article I’m going to show you, step by step, how to set up an OSX machine to provide secure access to git repositories over the internet via ssh. This was tested on OSX 10.6. github provides git repository hosting with a lovely interface. If github isn’t feasible, then this article will help you [...]

Using Blocks (i.e. Closures) To Improve Transactional Code

Tom — Sun, 21 Nov 2010 03:35:21 +0000

I stumbled across a nice article by Jonathan Dann about using blocks to improve transactional code. When I say "transactional" code, I mean code that has an opening, a middle, and a closing, where the opening and the closing have to be matched. You see it in a few places in Cocoa, such as: KVO: [...]

How Cocoa Bindings Work (via KVC and KVO)

Tom — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 01:41:26 +0000

Cocoa bindings can be a little confusing, especially to newcomers. Once you have an understanding of the underlying concepts, bindings aren’t too hard. In this article, I’m going to explain the concepts behind bindings from the ground up; first explaining Key-Value Coding (KVC), then Key-Value Observing (KVO), and finally explaining how Cocoa bindings are built [...]

AspectObjectiveC framework 1.0 Release

Tom — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 05:16:49 +0000

I’ve (finally) released version 1.0 of AOC. I could go on improving it forever, but it’s good enough to release so I’m going to set it free in the wild. Give it a spin, tell your neighbors, and let me know what you think. Manual: http://www.tomdalling.com/aoc_doc_mirror/ API Docs: http://www.tomdalling.com/aoc_doc_mirror/api/ Source/project: http://github.com/tomdalling/AspectObjectiveC Download (framework compiled for [...]

Manufactoria: A Tile-based Programming Game

Tom — Mon, 24 May 2010 11:14:00 +0000

What is a “tile-based programming game”? That’s a very good question. I never dreamt of such a thing until I played Manufactoria today. Be warned: if you’re not a programmer you will have great difficulty with this game. A picture is worth a thousand lines of code, so I’ll show you a screenshot from the [...]