Author Archives: Graham

About Graham

I make it faster and easier for you to create high-quality code.

What happens when you add one to an integer?

It depends. You saw in the previous post that there are plenty of different integer types, some with known sizes and some where the size is set by the implementation. Well for each size of integer type there are two … Continue reading

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How big is an integer?

In the beginning, when all was without form and void, Kernighan and Ritchie created char. And they said, “let it be of a size chosen by the compiler, guaranteed to be large enough to hold one character from the execution … Continue reading

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Server-side Objective-C

Recently, Kevin Lawler posted an “Informal Technical Note” saying that Apple could clean up on licence sales if only they’d support web backend development. There are only two problems with this argument: it’s flawed, and the precondition probably won’t be … Continue reading

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Can code be “readable”?

Did Isaac Asimov write good stories? Different people will answer that question in different ways. People who don’t read English and don’t have access to a translation will probably be unable to answer. People who don’t like science fiction on … Continue reading

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I published a new book!

Executive summary: it’s called APPropriate Behaviour, head over to the LeanPub site to check it out. For quite a while, I’ve noticed that posts here are moving away from nuts and bolts code towards questions about evaluating my own performance, … Continue reading

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Surprising ARC performance characteristics

The project I’m working on at the moment has quite tight performance constraints. It needs to start up quickly, do its work at a particular rate and, being an iOS app, there’s a hard limit on how much RAM can … Continue reading

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Sideloading content into iOS apps

All non-trivial apps visualise content in some form, whether it’s game levels embedded in the app, data loaded from some internet service, or something else. In many cases the developer who’s writing the Objective-C code isn’t going to be the … Continue reading

Posted in iPad, iPhone, tool-support | Comments Off on Sideloading content into iOS apps

Object-Oriented callback design

One of the early promises of object-oriented programming, encapsulated in the design of the Smalltalk APIs, was a reduction – or really an encapsulation – of the complexity of code. Many programmers believe that the more complex a method or … Continue reading

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How to excel at IDE design

When people have the “which IDE is best” argument, what they’re actually discussing is “which slightly souped-up monospace text editor with a build button do you like using”. Eclipse, Xcode, IntelliJ, Visual Studio…all of these tools riff on the same … Continue reading

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An apology to readers of Test-Driven iOS Development

I made a mistake. Not a typo or a bug in some pasted code (actually I’ve made some of those, too). I perpetuated what seems (now, since I analyse it) to be a big myth in software engineering. I uncritically … Continue reading

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