Edge Cases

Andrew Pontious talks with Wolf Rentzsch about blocks: their history, why they're weird, and why Apple should have just gone ahead and made them an Objective-C API.

Wolf Rentzsch talks with Andrew Pontious about his popular open source Core Data code generation tool, mogenerator. Plus: why Wolf may or may not be Batman.

Andrew Pontious talks with Wolf Rentzsch about automated tests for Cocoa applications and the very particular times when he finds them useful. (Hint: not ongoing maintenance.)

Wolf Rentzsch enthuses (and Andrew Pontious mostly listens) about Cappuccino, an advanced Web framework for making desktop-class web applications, essentially "Cocoa for the Web", with all the power and pitfalls that entails. Objective-J, anyone?

Andrew Pontious spends the entire episode with Wolf Rentzsch on followup, including someone trying AppCode based on his "recommendation" and a somewhat deeper, less rosy look at storyboards.

Wolf Rentzsch uses a simple C function example with Andrew Pontious to demonstrate (in record time!) Bertrand Meyer's Design by Contract, a cheap way to drastically improve your software quality. Could clang be the key to implementing it in Objective-C?

Andrew Pontious explores with Wolf Rentzsch the history of resources on Mac OS, starting with resource forks and ResEdit and ending with the new "storyboard" file format, which receives a shocking thumbs up! Afterwards, Wolf thinks about diffing issues.

Wolf Rentzsch talks with Andrew Pontious about data encoding and file formats, such as C structs, NSKeyedArchiver, QuickTime, ASN.1, plists, and JSON, as a way to introduce his own new untyped binary format, Lich. Plus: way too much MacGyver.

Andrew Pontious, with Wolf Rentzsch, asks the question developers ask when they have nothing else to talk about: tabs vs spaces? Also: braces styles, UniversalIndentGUI, and how Xcode handles indent levels.

Wolf Rentzsch talks with Andrew Pontious about concurrency (with the emphasis on "con"), from the earliest Mac SMP machines to the latest software advances such as Actors.

Wolf Rentzsch talks with Andrew Pontious about obsolescence. Do older machines really have to be cut off from the latest OS and application updates? Does higher-level software design (and open source data formats) help or hurt?

Andrew Pontious tries with guest cohost Uli Kusterer to make the case that C++ is a perfectly acceptable language for Objective-C developers to use under certain circumstances.

Andrew Pontious uses his new microphone to communicate with Wolf Rentzsch about...the ways developers communicate: in interviews, on the job, and on the Internet.

Wolf Rentzsch follows up with Andrew Pontious about AppleScript, Apple events, appscript, Distributed Objects, distributed computing, JSTalk, and sandboxing's IPC implications.

Andrew Pontious explains with Wolf Rentzsch some of his maintenance best practices, so that you can perform your own "slide" with the greatest of ease. (Andrew's audio drops occasionally throughout. Sorry, everyone!)