Category Archives: tool-support

A note on notes

Posted on 2013-03-02 by Graham

I’ve always had a way to take notes, but have never settled into a particular scheme. This post, more for my benefit than for yours, is an attempt to dig through this history and decide what I want to do … Continue reading →

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How to handle Xcode in your meta-build system’s iOS or Mac app target

Posted on 2013-02-28 by Graham

OK, I’ve said before in APPropriate Behaviour that I dislike build systems that build other build systems: Some build procedures get so complicated that they spawn another build system that configures the build environment for the target system before building. … Continue reading →

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Sideloading content into iOS apps

Posted on 2012-11-27 by Graham

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

I made a web!

Posted on 2012-08-19 by Graham

That is, I made a C program using the literate programming tool, CWEB. The product it outputs is, almost by definition, self-documenting, so find out about the algorithm and how I built it by reading the PDF. This post is … Continue reading →

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Using GNUstep libraries with Xcode

Posted on 2012-05-17 by Graham

I was recently asked about building projects that use GNUstep from Xcode. The fact is, it’s incredibly easy. By default, GNUstep on Mac OS X installs its libraries to /usr/local/lib and its frameworks to /Library/Frameworks. Therefore if you want to … Continue reading →

Posted in code-level, gnustep, tool-support | 1 Comment

Messing about with Clang

Posted on 2012-05-07 by Graham

I’ve been reading the Smalltalk-80 blue book (pdf) recently, and started to wonder what a Smalltalk style object browser for Objective-C would look like. Not just from the perspective of presenting the information that makes up Objective-C classes in novel … Continue reading →

Posted in code-level, Mac, software-engineering, tool-support | 5 Comments

Adding components to a GNUstep web / WebObjects app

Posted on 2012-03-28 by Graham

In WebObjects, Components take the role of a view controller in what passes for Cocoa’s version of MVC. Each is responsible for calculating the data that the view objects are bound to: you saw an example of this in the … Continue reading →

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Using Objective-C on the server

Posted on 2012-03-25 by Graham

My talk at NSConf was about cross-platform Objective-C. Those people who I talked to after the session will know that my goal is clear. There are plenty of people out there who have learned Objective-C to get onto the iOS … Continue reading →

Posted in NSConf, software-engineering, tool-support, WebObjects | 19 Comments

On home truths in iOS TDD

Posted on 2012-02-07 by Graham

The first readers of Test-Driven iOS Development (currently available in Rough Cuts form on Safari Books Online: if you want to buy a paper/kindle/iBooks editions, you’ll have to wait until it enters full production in a month or so) are … Continue reading →

Posted in books, code-level, TDD, tool-support | 7 Comments

So you don’t like your IDE

Posted on 2011-09-02 by Graham

There are many different tools for writing Objective-C code, though of course many people never stray much beyond the default that’s provided by their OS vendor. Here are some of the alternatives I’ve used: this isn’t an in-depth review of … Continue reading →