Author Archives: Jens Ayton

TVML explorations

So you looked at Apple’s very brief example of how to set up a TVML app. What’s next? First, a side note: if you jump into TVML expecting a general UI framework, you’ll be disappointed. TVML is a toolkit for … Continue reading

Posted in Cocoa, Code | 1 Comment

Death to printf()

A couple of weeks ago, Jean-Francois Roy twote: Format strings should be localizable. But that opens you to format string exploits. No win? — Jean-Francois Roy (@jfroy) 6 januari 2013 Actually, there’s a conceptually simple win: don’t let your format strings … Continue reading

Posted in Cocoa, Code | 1 Comment

Imitating Greateness: 16-bit Hack ALU Design in Minecraft

In the autumn of 2010, a video of a sixteen-bit ALU in Minecraft by theinternetftw went viral. A month later, I’d bought the game, played around with circuits a bit and published a detailed description of a functionally identical (but … Continue reading

Posted in Minecraft | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Almost elegant cave man debugging

Recently, the Twitternets pointed me at Vincent Gable’s blog post, The Most Useful Objective-C Code I’ve Ever Written. It is indeed quite useful; given a semi-arbitrary expression, it prints out the value, using @encode() and macros to minimize drudgery.

Posted in Cocoa, Code | Tagged , | 8 Comments

Proposal: generics (and some other stuff) for Objective-C

Some time ago, Greg Parker asked the Twitternets what we’d like to see in a purely hypothetical Objective-C-without-the-C language. Someone — I believe it was Landon Fuller — pointed at an article about the Strongtalk type system for Smalltalk. I … Continue reading

Posted in Cocoa, Code | Tagged , , , , , | 10 Comments

Multi-type Save Panel Controller

As a change of pace, I thought I’d post some code that doesn’t go out of its way to be bad. JAMultiTypeSavePanelController is a class (abstracted from ImageIO Export for Acorn) to handle the case where you want to offer … Continue reading

Posted in Cocoa, Code | 1 Comment

Wanted: a Right-Handed Keyboard

My current keyboard looks like this: (Well, roughly. It actually looks like this, but I couldn’t find a decent-resolution Swedish one.) This was a sensible design for the right-handed majority when it was introduced, some time in the stone age. … Continue reading

Posted in Hardware | 5 Comments

Constant objects for fun and non-profit

The @"foo" operator for constant NSString objects in Objective-C is extremely convenient. Indeed, if it wasn’t there, programming with Cocoa would be a royal pain. Many of us have at various points wished there was equivalent syntax for NSNumbers, and … Continue reading

Posted in Cocoa, Code | Tagged | 3 Comments

Fun with the Objective-C Runtime

Ever since Leopard came out, I’ve wanted to do something useful with resolveInstanceMethod:. The opportunity has yet to present itself. However, I have done a couple of really silly things with it, which have until now languished in obscurity in … Continue reading

Posted in Cocoa, Code | Tagged | 4 Comments

Migratory Code

Of the two people I know of who have tried to get at some of my code releases in the past year, a full 50 % have given up and written a new implementation from scratch because downloading and opening a … Continue reading

Posted in Code | Tagged , , | Leave a comment