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NSHipster Quiz #1
On April 9th, the first-ever NSHipster Pub Quiz was held in Berlin. Think of your traditional pub quiz crossed with "Stump the Experts", with questions about things that you know and care about:...
View ArticleMKLocalSearch
Look, we get it: people are upset about Apple Maps.What should have been a crowning feature for iOS 6 became the subject of an official apology due to its embarrassing inaccuracies and the removal of...
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GPUImage
Here at NSHipster, we're all about diving into the darker corners of Objective-C to learn something new about the systems we interact with every day. Often, this means sifting through Apple frameworks...
View ArticleNSCoding / NSKeyedArchiver
Among the most important architectural decisions made when building an app is how to persist data between launches. The question of how, exactly, to re-create the state of the app from the time it was...
View ArticleCore Data Libraries & Utilities
So let's say that, having determined your particular needs and compared all of the alternatives, you've chosen Core Data for your next app.Nothing wrong with that! Core Data is a great choice for apps...
View ArticleUnit Testing
Unit Testing is an emotional topic for developers. It inspires a sense of superiority to its most zealous adherents, and evokes a feeling of inadequacy to non-practitioners. Cargo Cults like TDD&...
View ArticleNSDataDetector
Machines speak in binary, while humans speak in riddles, half-truths, and omissions.And until humanity embraces RDF for all of their daily interactions, a large chunk of artificial intelligence is...
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NSHipster Quiz #2
On June 11th, we organized an NSHipster Pub Quiz for WWDC attendees. Like our first quiz, questions ranged from random Apple trivia to obscure framework questions. The event was hosted by New Relic,...
View ArticleObject Subscripting
Xcode 4.4 quietly introduced a syntactic revolution to Objective-C. Like all revolutions, however, its origins and agitators require some effort to trace: Xcode 4.4 shipped with Apple LLVM Compiler...
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NSUUID / CFUUIDRef / UIDevice -uniqueIdentifier / -identifierForVendor
Let's say you're making privacy software that also prevents piracy. I mean, it's an obvious idea—someone's going to do it. You're just trying to be that person.Until recently, it was trivial to...
View ArticleNSFastEnumeration / NSEnumerator / -enumerateObjectsUsingBlock:
Enumeration is where computation gets interesting. It's one thing to encode logic that's executed once, but applying it across a collection—that's what makes programming so powerful.Each programming...
View ArticleNSExpression
Cocoa is the envy of other standard libraries when it comes to querying and arranging information. With NSPredicate, NSSortDescriptor, and an occasional NSFetchRequest, even the most complex data tasks...
View ArticleNSPredicate
NSPredicate is a Foundation class that specifies how data should be fetched or filtered. Its query language, which is like a cross between a SQL WHERE clause and a regular expressions, provides an...
View ArticleUIMenuController
Mobile usability today is truly quite remarkable—especially considering how far it's come in just the last decade. What was once a clumsy technology relegated to the tech elite has now become the...
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NSHipster Quiz #3
NSHipster Pub Quiz came to New York City on July 30th. Like our first and second quizzes, questions ranged from random Apple trivia to obscure framework questions—this time, with a particular focus on...
View ArticleDocumentation
There's an adage among Cocoa developers that Objective-C's verbosity lends its code to being effectively self-documenting. Between longMethodNamesWithNamedParameters: and the explicit typing of those...
View Articlerand(3) / random(3) / arc4random(3) / et al.
What passes for randomness is merely a hidden chain of causality.In a mechanical universe of material interactions expressed through mathematical equations, it is unclear whether nature encodes an...
View ArticleNSHashTable & NSMapTable
NSSet and NSDictionary, along with NSArray are the workhorse collection classes of Foundation. Unlike other standard libraries, implementation details are hidden from developers, allowing them to write...
View ArticleEquality
The concept of equality is a central point of debate and inquiry in philosophy and mathematics, with far-reaching implications for matters of ethics, justice, and public policy.From an empiricist...
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Xcode Snippets
iOS development all but requires the use of Xcode. To its credit, Xcode has improved pretty consistently over the last couple of years. Sure, it still has its... quirks, but hey—things could be much,...
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