Key-Value Coding is part of the magic behind Cocoa’s bindings. Up until yesterday I had only been binding to an ObjectController or to an ArrayController backed by Core Data. This is very powerful, but bindings pre-date Core Data so clearly not a necessity. So yesterday I went to bind an NSProgressIndicator’s ‘isIndeteriminate’ to a BOOL. [...]

When using Core Data, Boolean values as an attribute are represented using NSNumber. That’s all fine and good, but it requires you to use [NSNumber numberWithBool:YES|NO] when you set the value.

NO is defined as:

define NO (BOOL)0

we have an issue. 0 is also [...]

Somewhere there exists a list of words you shouldn’t assign as attributes within Core Data. I don’t know where that list is, and today I got bit by not knowing. I tried to use the word “deleted” as an attribute. No matter how hard I tried to set the “deleted” value and [...]

I’m spending some time working on a new project (sorry, not quite ready to explain what it is) and have spent the time to write some unit tests[1]. The tests run in a script and one problem I had was that there seemed to be no way to debug the tests if things went [...]

NSString has a great little method prototyped as

- (id)propertyList

What does it do? To quote the docs:

Parses the receiver as a text representation of a property list, returning an NSString, NSData, NSArray, or NSDictionary object, according to the topmost element.

If you started staring at CFPropertyList(…) functions, just trying to figure out how to read a [...]

My curiosity often costs me a lot of time. My most recent expense started when I subscribed to the coding monkeys blog and read their post about how SubEthaEdit (what a great icon) fully supports being an external editor for Xcode. I don’t plan to collaborate, but I had to try it. [...]

I finally got sick of changing MyCompanyName in my new source files. To change MyCompanyName to something useful, you need to edit the ORGANIZATIONNAME in the com.apple.Xcode prefs. I used the ‘defaults write’ method described here, which looks like this: defaults write com.apple.Xcode PBXCustomTemplateMacroDefinitions \ ‘{ “ORGANIZATIONNAME” = “YourCompanyName”;}’ Surprisingly, I had to quit and reopen [...]

I’m trying to debug a problem using Xcode’s debugger. All should be well, except the dang thing won’t break for me!? I have an NSLog statement and a breakpoint set on the line of code just before that NSLog. I see the log entry[1] but no break. ugh. I’ve sprinkled [...]

Short version: Xcode is secretly building my release builds as universal binaries. Editing the pbxproj to remove the reference to i386 fixed things for me. update:It’s something with my environment causing this.

Longer version: I recently added Growl support to my app. It was super easy. I snagged the Growl source, built the Growl.framework and followed [...]

To build an Xcode project from the command line, run “xcodebuild” in your project directory. Here are some useful examples:

xcodebuild -configuration Debug xcodebuild -configuration Release clean build

Consult ‘man xcodebuild’ for more information.