Blogs from the Ranch Mark Dalrymple

Mark Dalrymple

Author Big Nerd Ranch

MarkD is a long-time Unix and Mac developer, having worked at AOL, Google, and several start-ups over the years. He’s the author of Advanced Mac OS X Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide, over 100 blog posts for Big Nerd Ranch, and an occasional speaker at conferences. Believing in the power of community, he’s a co-founder of CocoaHeads, an international Mac and iPhone meetup, and runs the Pittsburgh PA chapter. In his spare time, he plays orchestral and swing band music.

All Android Design Full-Stack Web iOS Leadership

Property List Serialization

iOS Mac

Saving data to the file system and reading it back is a pretty common operation. One of the first ways many Cocoa and...

Mark Dalrymple

May 13, 2012

Actually finding a memory management error with Instruments

iOS Mac

Instruments is a very cool profiling application, but it’s one of those things that’s kind of hard to write about. You can outline...

Mark Dalrymple

May 9, 2012

BOOL's sharp corners

iOS Mac

Update October 2013 - On 64-bit iOS (device and simulator) BOOL is now actually bool, so the sharp corners have thankfully gone away for...

Mark Dalrymple

May 6, 2012

Both kinds of Cocoa

iOS Mac

If you’re an iOS programmer who only programs CocoaTouch, I want to encourage you to give desktop Cocoa a try. I’ve primarily been...

Mark Dalrymple

Apr 29, 2012

Table Scanning

iOS Mac

Every now and then I get a question about an idiom I use for looping through a collection of literal structures. This...

Mark Dalrymple

Apr 25, 2012

A Motivation for ivar decorations

iOS Mac

An idiom used by some Objective-C programmers is prefixing instance variable names with underscores. You do see this with explicitly declared instance variables:

Mark Dalrymple

Apr 22, 2012

Protocols Part 3 : Adopting Protocols in Class Extensions

iOS Mac

One of the directions Apple is taking in Objective C that I’ve come to really like is the migration of stuff out of header...

Mark Dalrymple

Apr 15, 2012

Protocols part 2 : Delegation

iOS Mac

Last time we talked about protocols and why you’d want to use one. So, when would you want to make your own protocol?...

Mark Dalrymple

Apr 11, 2012

Protocols, part 1 : Why?

iOS Mac

A comment from a reader of Objective-C Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide came through on the forums, asking about Objective-C protocols. Specifically,...

Mark Dalrymple

Apr 8, 2012

Checking Assumptions: -measuring isEqual[ToString]: performance

iOS Mac

The last post about isEqual: vs isEqualToString: included some timings I made to test the performance of those two calls, along with compare:. ...

Mark Dalrymple

Mar 28, 2012

isEqual: vs isEqualToString:

iOS Mac

_TL;DR: When to use isEqual: or isEqualToString:? There’s no meaningful performance difference between the two. For convenience use isEqual:. For a...

Mark Dalrymple

Mar 25, 2012