For the past week or so, I’ve been suffering from slowness in the Finder, corrupted icons and terrible performance in our version control client (Versions). Today, I decided to do something about it. The first step was to sample Versions while it was beachballing. The app was spending most of its time in [NSWorkspace iconForFile:]. [...]
If you don’t already know about it, setting actions for breakpoints in Xcode is a great way to monitor repetitive code without adding a bunch of NSLog() to your code. After setting a breakpoint, right-click and select “Edit Breakpoint…”. Then select “Debugger Command” for the Action. You can enter any valid debugger command at this [...]
A tweet this morning by James Duncan Davidson got me thinking about the future of Retina images on the web. Before I start talking about the future, let’s take a quick look at the past. There was a time, not too long ago, where many of us were trapped behind 56kbps modems with 256 color [...]
I’ve always loved shows that take you behind the scenes of creative efforts: Project Runway and Classic Albums being two of my favorites. Here’s one about the development of Twitterrific 5. Since a lot of the people reading this aren’t developers, I’m going to keep the jargon to a minimum. You’ll be able to enjoy [...]
Today we released an update for xScope that supports the Retina display. As I alluded to on Episode 14 of The Talk Show, this update was harder than most. The 68k to PowerPC, Carbon to Cocoa, and PowerPC to Intel transitions were no walk in the park, but this update really kicked my butt. Here’s [...]
If you’re working on an app that uses Core Data, it’s inevitable that you’ll end up in the debugger and need to dig around in the object graph. You’ll also quickly realize that Core Data’s -description of an object isn’t terribly helpful: (lldb) po myListObj (List *) $19 = 0x08054ac0 <List: 0x8054ac0> (entity: List; id: [...]
Like many of you, I’ve recently starting coming to terms with automatic reference counting (ARC) in Objective-C. For the most part, it’s gone remarkably smoothly. The only hard part is remembering to not type autorelease! ARC lets us get rid of the retain/release pairs in our code. But can you spot the bug in the [...]
I think we can all agree that iTunes is in need of a major overhaul. So why isn’t it happening? Apple has shown no fear of rethinking and innovating with the user interfaces that manage our own personal data. Both the iMovie and iPhoto apps are great examples of this: they’ve gotten much simpler to [...]
If you follow me on Twitter, you’re probably aware of a really nasty problem I encountered with versioned Core Data models. Suffice it to say that was two days of hell caused by a single Fetch Request in a .xcdatamodeld file. The irony of it all is that I no longer use Fetch Requests this [...]
Many of us rely on VMware Fusion for testing our products both on older and newer versions of Mac OS X. Your development machine may be running Lion, but it’s incredibly handy to run both Snow Leopard and Mountain Lion on the same machine. With the recent release of Mountain Lion DP2 some problems cropped [...]