Monthly Archives: April 2012

Software-ICs and a component marketplace

In the previous post, I was talking about Object-Oriented Programming, an Evolutionary Approach. What follows is a thought experiment based on that. Chapter 6 of Brad Cox’s book, once he’s finished explaining how ObjC works (and who to buy it … Continue reading

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Comparing Objective-C and Objective-C with Objective-C

A while back, I wrote an object-oriented dispatch system for Objective-C. It defines only three things: an object type (the BlockObject), a way to create new objects (the BlockConstructor), and a way to message objects (the dispatch mechanism). That’s all … Continue reading

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The debugger of royalty

We’ve all got little libraries of code or scripts that help us with debugging. Often these are for logging information in a particular way, or wrapping logs/tests such that they’re only invoked in Debug builds but not in production. Or … Continue reading

Posted in code-level, iPad, iPhone, Mac, TDiOSD | 11 Comments

TDD and crypto in one place

Well, I suppose if I’ve written two books, it’s about time I wrote a contorted blog post that references both of the worlds. I recently wrote an encryption module for an app, and thought it’d be useful to share something … Continue reading

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Culture, heritage and apps

I said earlier on Twitter that I’m disappointed with the state of apps produced for museums and libraries. I’d better explain what I mean. Here’s what I said: Disappointed to find that many museum apps (British Library, Bodleian, Concorde etc) … Continue reading

Posted in Business | 2 Comments

Test-Driven iOS Development

Here it is, after more than a year in the making, the book that they really did want you to read! Test-driven IOS Development (Developer’s Library) (affiliate link) has finally hit the stores[*]. I wrote this book for the simple … Continue reading

Posted in books, PCAS, software-engineering, TDD, TDiOSD | 6 Comments

On the magic of key agreement

Imagine that you want to implement AirDrop, or something like it. Two computers that have (possibly) never communicated before are going to share a file. Now you know that you want to encrypt the file in transit so that only … Continue reading

Posted in Crypto | Comments Off on On the magic of key agreement

On my newer competence

This time last year, I evaluated myself against the programmer competency matrix. So where am I one turn around the daystar later? I have to admit that this was mainly because I was jet lagged in a hotel room in … Continue reading

Posted in Business, software-engineering | Comments Off on On my newer competence

An apology and an opportunity

Today’s earlier post, UX is snake-oil bullshit, was indeed an April Fool. Sorry to the people who had their “WTF blood boil”, among other reactions. I’m also sorry to the people I parodied in the post. Please feel comfortable knowing … Continue reading

Posted in user-error | 1 Comment

UX is snake-oil bullshit

There, I said it. I feel better already. There are people in the world who’ll tell you that the most important thing in the world is UX, that if your software isn’t UX-compliant it isn’t worth shit. Here’s why that’s … Continue reading

Posted in software-engineering, user-error | 6 Comments