Sunset over Canyonlands National Park, viewed from BLM's Needles Overlook in Utah.
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Physics in Interstellar
I was willing and ready to accept pretty much all of the science in Interstellar. But I have one big problem: rocket fuel.
Back Buttons for Web View Controllers
If Zawinski's Law applies to desktop software, then I propose a corollary for iPhone apps: every app expands until it includes a web browser. In-app browser design is something I care deeply about, mostly because everybody gets it wrong.
Real World Singleton Design
A discussion of practical architectural concerns when designing a singleton for a real-world iOS application.
Greg Titus on NSFileCoordination and Extensions
It does work, but you have to be careful.
iOS 8 Extensions Roundup
I’m excited to start using iOS 8 extensions, but it’s looking like it’ll be a rough ride for a little while.
Let’s talk about Optionals
There has been much complaining that Swift's Optional type forces you to think about whether something may be nil at every use, but aren’t we thinking about that already, just maybe implicitly?
Swift’s optionals simply formally enforce the thinking we already must consider when writing (or …
Benefits of Cocoa: Still here in Swift
Until now we all agreed these were benefits of Cocoa:
* C compatibility
* Dynamic dispatch
* Nil safety
* Duck typing
Now they're all bad?
— Nick Lockwood (@nicklockwood) August 6, 2014
Sigh.
Okay, let’s take this one item at a time:
C compatibility
Still there.
Nil safety
Was never there …
It’s Not Exploitable
This article showed an excellent point: taken alone, a memory leak or other “low-impact” bug may not appear to be much of a problem. But taken together, a set of these bugs can turn into an exploitable security hole.
A few classes of bugs used in that exploit:
* off-by-one
* memory …
Code Optional
Part of the Project Announcements series.
I realized today I didn’t post anything here announcing Code Optional. I launched this podcast in July with my friends Andrew and Kevin, two of the sharpest developers I know.
We aim to discuss all sorts of topics around development, design, and shipping …
Tech Debt and Refactoring
Refactor as necessary to avoid adding tech debt during day-to-day. Add tests and rearchitect during the normal development cycle when adding to a preexisting codebase.
Taking the time to do things right makes everything take a little longer than it strictly needs to, but it allows you to avoid unpredictable …
Explicit Programming
Concretely, this post is about a guideline for object-oriented and imperative programming, but the underlying principles and conclusions should be equally applicable to some other paradigms. One example here uses Cocoa Touch and Objective-C pseudocode, but again the principles described apply equally to any framework.
It’s very easy to …
Follow me on Pinboard
Update, April 2023: I’m no longer using Pinboard.
I’ve been pretty excited about Pinboard lately. I realized a while ago that its network feature (including RSS), in conjunction with support for tags and notes (including the <blockquote> tag) make it basically a microlinkblogging service.
I always …
Quick followup on singletons
Part of the Singletons series.
This is a quick followup to my post about singletons in Cocoa apps. Read it first for context.
Another developer asked me a few questions about the points I made in my previous post on singletons. I’d like to post my (lightly edited) comments …
Including your Pods directory in source control
On my current project, we made the decision a month or so ago to add our Pods directory to git.
The team has seen a number of benefits from this decision. There are certainly some negatives, but in our experience the positives have been huge, immediately tangible, and well worth …