NSIndexSet
NSIndexSet (and its mutable counterpart, NSMutableIndexSet) represents a sorted collection of unique unsigned integers–think of it like an NSRange that supports non-contiguous series. It has wicked...
View ArticleNSCache
Poor NSCache, always being overshadowed by NSMutableDictionary in the most inappropriate circumstances. It’s like no one knows its there, ready to provide all of that garbage collection behavior that...
View ArticleNSSortDescriptor
When making apps, sorting is just something you can assume to be fast, and utility is measured in how easy it is to do what you need. In this respect, Foundation’s NSSortDescriptor is perhaps the most...
View ArticleNSDateComponents
NSDateComponents serves an important role in the date and time APIs in Foundation. By itself, it’s just a container for information about a date, such as its month, year, day of month, week of year, or...
View ArticleCFStringTransform
There are two indicators that can tell you pretty much everything you need to know about how nice a language is to use:API ConsistencyQuality of String ImplementationNSString is the crown jewel of...
View ArticleNSIncrementalStore
Even for a blog dedicated to obscure APIs, NSIncrementalStore brings a new meaning to the word “obscure”.It was introduced in iOS 5, with no more fanfare than the requisite entry in the SDK...
View ArticleNSOperation
Everyone knows that the secret to making an app snappy and responsive is to offload computation to be done asynchronously in the background. Thus, the modern Objective-C developer has two options:...
View ArticleCFBag
Objective-C is a language caught between two worlds.On one side, it follows the thoughtful, object-oriented philosophy of Smalltalk, which brings ideas like message sending and named parameters. On the...
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NSLocale
And like any habit, it becomes second-nature with practice, to the point that you couldn’t imagine not doing it. All it takes is for someone to show you the way.Let NSHipster be your dental hygienist...
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UIAccessibility
We all want to help one another, human beings are like that.- Charlie ChaplinYou know what I wish everyone would copy from Apple? Their assistive technologies.iPhones and iPads–magical as they...
View ArticleNSCharacterSet
As mentioned previously, Foundation boasts one of the best, most complete implementations of strings around.But a string implementation is only as good as the programmer who wields it. So this week,...
View ArticleUICollectionView
UICollectionView is the new UITableView. It’s that important.This is not to say that collection views are in any way unknown or obscure–anyone who went to any of the WWDC sessions about it, or got to...
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#pragma
#pragma declarations are a mark of craftsmanship in Objective-C. Although originally used to make source code compatible between different compilers, the Xcode-savvy coder uses #pragma declarations to...
View Article@
Birdwatchers refer to it as (and I swear I’m not making this up) “Jizz”: those indefinable characteristics unique to a particular kind of thing.This term can be appropriated to describe how seasoned...
View ArticleAddressBookUI
Address Book UI is an iOS framework for displaying, selecting, editing, and creating contacts in a user’s Address Book. Similar to the Message UI framework, Address Book UI contains a number of...
View ArticleNSLinguisticTagger
NSLinguisticTagger is a veritable Swiss Army Knife of linguistic functionality, with the ability to tokenize natural language strings into words, determine their part-of-speech & stem, extract...
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UILocalizedIndexedCollation
UITableView starts to become unwieldy once it gets to a few hundred rows. If users are reduced to frantically scratching at the screen like a cat playing Fruit Ninja in order to get at what they want…...
View ArticleNSURLProtocol
iOS is all about networking–whether it’s reading or writing state to and from the server, offloading computation to a distributed system, or loading remote images, audio, and video from the...
View ArticleNSValueTransformer
Of all the Foundation classes, NSValueTransformer is perhaps the one that fared the worst in the shift from OS X to iOS.Why? Well, there are two reasons:The first and most obvious reason is that...
View ArticleNS_ENUM & NS_OPTIONS
When everything is an object, nothing is.Actually… that’s pretty deep. Hmmm.So, there are a few ways you could parse that, but for the purposes of this article, this is all to say: sometimes it’s nice...
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