cocoacast's blog

We (and by we I mean our English community since our French "branch" is very active) were idle for a long time now. The things are going to change soon. New format of the show is on it's way.

Boris

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Steven Degutis recently wrote a library (actually still working on it) in Cocoa that greatly simplifies the access of pretty much most RESTful services. It's called CocoaREST (source located at GitHub) and he originally wrote it to replace MGTwitterEngine for his app, but it turned out a lot more flexible and should be able to support most RESTful services (OAuth isn't supported yet but will soon be). We think it is very cool and you should play with it in your own apps.

In this Episode we look at Property Lists. Find out about the types of property lists, when to use them, and how to serialize and deserialize them. Please watch our site for more details. A brief overview of the subject can be found in Serialization in Cocoa - Property Lists.
Please Note: a bug was found in the source for this episode and corresponding article. Keys and values were reversed in setObject, whuch resulted in NSDate and NSNumbers failing to serialize. I have updated the source code and the article, but it's too late for the recording. Please keep these changes in mind.

In this Episode we start our journey into iPhone SDK. The table view is de-facto most used interface component of the iPhone SDK and therefore table cells are used a lot. Apple does not officially shows how to create table view cells in Interface Builder, so it is up to us to show how it is done, which is what we do in this episodes. We also explain the importance of the Reuse Identifier.

Introduction

In the last serialization article, I showed you how to use the archiving capabilities of Cocoa. Cocoa is very powerful, so here goes yet another way to serialize objects: Property Lists. Property lists do not give you a way to specify how and what data is to be serialized. You are forced to use plist-serializable data types: NSArray, NSDictionary, NSData, NSDate, NSNumber, and NSString, their mutable twins, or their Core Foundation equivalents. So, it’s impossible to serialize an arbitrary object like you would with archives, but it is very convenient to store configuration properties, that are usually stored in dictionaries, etc.

In Episode 44 of the Cocoacast show, we’ve talked about how XML can be used to develop applications. I’ve covered basics of NSXML and NSXMLParser. Examples, that you can find in our Code Library cover various ways of parsing and searching XML data. This is an advanced episode, and as such, we will discuss things that go beyond use in a typical application. Today, we will discuss XML manipulation: how to build and modify DOM model and how to apply XSLT transformations.

When I first saw what Growl does a few years back, my first thought was “Oh my God, they moving Windows API to Mac.” As you can imagine, that is a horror thought to have. If you had never seen Growl in action and do not have a Mac, the best way to view what Growl does is to think of all those message bubbles that Windows is famous for;such as software update messages or messages notifying you that your neighbors APC was unplugged. The point I’m trying to make is that first impressions are wrong sometimes and I was wrong about Growl too. What Growl proves is the fact that even the worst technology that Microsoft can come up with, could be adopted on the Mac, and really make the idea shine.
It’s been a while since I first looked at Growl. My fellow podcaster, Philippe Guitard, made me do that by producing a show for CocoaCast that explained how to take advantage for Growl. You can view the show here, and so I would not go into too much detail about it here - just enough to get you interested and appreciate Growl for what it is.