It seems that many of the apps in use today rely on or display feeds or lists of data; be that a Twitter timeline, an RSS feed or a list of history in a version control system, there’s a common trend in UI for using lists.
But displaying lists in applications can be much more than trivial, certainly for applications on …

Attending Matt Gemmell’s workshop last week was a great exercise for thinking from the user’s perspective – something which we, as software developers, often do not usually spend enough time doing because of being wrapped up in other things.
As developers, it is hard for us to detach ourselves from what we do and cater to the user. We live on …

It was the second and final day of the NSConference 2010 Mac Developer Conference and most delegates were tired and a little hungover. But there was another great line up of speakers for the day, and it was another day of socialising and fun, as well as all that other learning stuff.
Perhaps the biggest things I took away from the …

It was the first day of the NSConference 2010 Mac developer conference and a great lineup was ahead.
In terms of the day generally, it was a brilliant experience. It was well organised and many thanks go to Scotty, Tim, Dave and all the other NSConference staff. The WiFi (although irritating that you had to keep filling out the signup form) …

The NSUserDefaults class provides Cocoa applications access to the underlying Mac OS X defaults system, and can be used to store and persist user preferences.
Whilst providing an interface to the defaults system, the NSUserDefaults class can also be used to access command line arguments that were passed when the executable was launched, which have already been parsed and are accessed …

Source Lists feature in many Mac OS X applications. From iTunes to iCal to Versions, they are a great navigation control.
But for us Cocoa developers, they aren’t that easy to implement. You can easily create an NSOutlineView and set its highlight mode to “Source List” but none of the other Source List features come built in out of the box, …

Interface Builder is one of Apple’s developer tools, used to design interfaces for both Mac OS X and iPhone applications, and in most instances saves developers huge amounts of time from having to write the equivalent code, whilst also providing a useful visual representation of the interfaces they are working on.
Some developers try and fight Interface Builder, and would rather …

Reinventing the wheel – a phrase which means duplicating an existing feature from scratch – is often used in the context that it is unnecessary or inefficient.
I think that in most cases this is true, but I was hesitant to start this post by screaming to never, ever, under any circumstances whatsoever reinvent the wheel, because I think that sometimes …

When starting out with Mac development, I turned to Aaron Hillegass’s Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X, and compared to other books available on the subject I was very pleased with it. One point that he made in the opening chapter has pretty much remained true whilst I’ve been developing under OS X with the Cocoa frameworks:
Most of the time, …

Cambridge was the penultimate city of the Stack Overflow DevDays world (or America and Europe) tour and was situated at Robinson College at Cambridge University. The day was a great opportunity to see introductory presentations on the hotness in the developer community, and also to meet other devs and heroes of mine. The Carsonified team (who were running the events) …