APPropriate Behaviour
The book about all the things software writers do that aren't writing software.
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Author Archives: Graham
Illuminative-C
In addition to being a mildly accomplished software engineer, I’ve done some studying and armchair research in the field of ancient languages and palaeography. What happens if we smoosh those fields together? In a very slight way, art historian and … Continue reading
Posted in advancement of the self, books, code-level, documentation, PCAS, software-engineering, UI
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On community
This is a post that had been boiling for a while; I talked a little about the topic when I was in Appsterdam earlier this year, and had a few more thoughts which were completely supplanted and rearranged by watching
Posted in AAPL, advancement of the self, books, Business, iDeveloper.TV, iPhone, Mac, NSConf, OOP, Responsibility, software-engineering, Talk, WebObjects
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Password checking with CommonCrypto
I previously described a system for storing and checking credentials on Mac OS and iOS based on using many rounds of a hashing function to generate a key from the password. Time has moved on, and Apple has extended the … Continue reading
Posted in Authentication, code-level, Crypto, password
1 Comment
Sound bites considered harmful
Knuth said: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Only, what he actually said was: There is no doubt that the grail of efficiency leads to abuse. Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the … Continue reading
Posted in software-engineering
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How people learn
Don’t you hate those times when you go to a talk or article that says “you should be doing this”, but then doesn’t explain how to do that? I just wrote one. In “Coding. Standards.” I explained that what software … Continue reading
Posted in advancement of the self, books, Talk
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Coding. Standards.
I just realised that this month marks the 10th anniversary of my first payment for writing software (on, of all the weird things to be writing software on in 2002, a NeXTstation)! What have I learned from those ten years? … Continue reading
Posted in advancement of the self, Business, code-level, OOP, software-engineering
2 Comments
Objective-C literals and subscripts
If you’re using clang from their website instead of sticking with Apple’s release, you get support for Objective-C literals and object subscripting. I thought I’d take the BrowseOverflow app and apply this new syntax to it. Notice that the code … Continue reading
Posted in code-level, OOP
2 Comments
Supporting both ARC and MRC build settings
Let’s face it, people don’t read `README`s. If you write library code that people are going to use in their own projects, you can’t rely on that bit at the bottom of the documentation that tells people to do -fobjc-arc … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
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App security consultancy from your favourite boffin
I’m very excited to soon be joining the ranks of Agant Ltd, working on some great apps with an awesome team of people. I’ll be bringing with me my favourite title, Smartphone Security Boffin. Any development team can benefit from … Continue reading
Posted in Business, ssl, threatmodel
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Class clusters, placeholder objects, value-oriented programming, and all that good stuff.
Have you ever seen this exception in your crash log? 2012-05-29 17:55:37.240 Untitled 2[5084:707] *** Terminating app due to uncaught exception ‘NSInvalidArgumentException’, reason: ‘*** -length only defined for abstract class. Define -[NSPlaceholderString length]!’ What’s that NSPlaceholderString class? Leaving aside NSMutableString … Continue reading
Posted in code-level, Foundation, software-engineering
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