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 …

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 first day of NSConference 2010 kicked off with two workshops – Concurrency Programming on Snow Leopard by Drew McCormack, and The World According to Gemmell, by the Legend himself, of which I was an attendee.
The session started with a discussion about a certain recently released Apple product which was very interesting and allowed us to present our thoughts on …

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 …

After the popularity of my post on the useful features of Xcode, titled Xcoding Made Easy, I decided to write a followup post detailing more features about the IDE which help make developing applications a much easier process.
Project Breakpoints

Breakpoints are a great convenience method for debugging your code. However, if you have lots of breakpoints, how do you manage them …

I often find myself answering questions on Stack Overflow where users question whether they are managing memory correctly. I often refer to Apple’s guide on Object Ownership and Disposal, from the Memory Management Programming Guide for Cocoa, since this explains why what they are doing is either correct or incorrect.
Notably are the object “ownership” conventions which the guide outlines. Ownership …

Xcode is Apple’s Integrated Development Environment for applications written for OS X or iPhone OS. With the increasing popularity for software written for both platforms, here are some useful features of Xcode that make coding using it a much smoother and easier process.
Keyboard Shortcuts
There are a plethora of keyboard shortcuts in Xcode to perform common tasks associated with various aspects …