Oramind - Oramind- Envision Technology

Xcode and iOS 5: Bringing back backtrace symbols

If you have downloaded iOS 5, you will have aundoubtedly noticed that there is something important missing about the new SDK: the stack trace printed from each exception. You now see hexadecimal representations of symbols where you previewsly saw full human-readable symbols.

Last Updated on Saturday, 31 March 2012 07:22

GCD, NSOperation and Core Data/ Files on disk

Core data is fast, even on iOS, where handheld devices lack in speed when compared to desktop computers. However, there will be times where you will be required to do some heavy reading, wether that will be plain files from disk or information stored in Core Data. In my case, I initially tried to load too much data from a Core Data database using GCD, resulting in deadlocks, and later, I tried that using NSOperation. To save many people from frustration, I thought I should post my experiences and some general guidelines here.

Last Updated on Thursday, 09 February 2012 15:39

Making fat static Libraries (Simulator + Device), and applying to Three20

I am starting to get involved with the Three20 project. This project contains valuable classes and UI elements that I need. However, this big library is notorious for its difficulty to include inside an XCode 4 project. The included install script does not work, and the manual install instructions are a miss, and I ended up with Xcode complaining that it can't find header files, even if I had set up the header search paths correctly.

So, I decided to pre-build the static libraries and include them to my project, and I was successful... to an extent. You see, I couldn't use the same static libraries for the Simulator and the device, because the libraries built are built each time for the device you specify, and that device only. For example, if you build the libraries for the simulator, the produced libraries will work for the simulator. For the device, you need a different library package.

That led me to the long trip of finding a way to compile a static library for iOS that works for different architectures: armv6, armv7, and i386. Read on to find out how you can manage to make a static library that will work on all platforms.

Last Updated on Sunday, 21 August 2011 23:05

Thoughts on Singletons

There are sometimes where some things keep bugging me in terms of programming. I often keep asking myself and others about utilizing the best techniques to solve various programming problems and applying certain concepts in a program.

Most answers I keep reading/hearing tend towards the “wow” factor. Which is something like “I don’t know exactly why, but it would be cooler if you did it like this”. I don’t usually listen to any recommendation regarding programming practices if it isn’t backed up by strong arguments as to how it may affect me in the long or short term as far as my projects are concerned. As programming languages are evolving, so do practices utilizing those languages, and often, as good programmers as we may be, we may sometimes find ourselves lagging behind others who may be less experienced, but better listeners.

Let’s face it. Many of us have utilized a not-so-well-thought technique in favor of completing a task within a certain amount of time. In other words, we have all sacrificed the chance to use good programming practices in need of being “faster”. Usually, this results in usable code, that may be improved in later versions. Less often, this isn’t the case.

As far as programming practices go, there are few of them that have received as much love and hate as Singletons.

Last Updated on Thursday, 18 August 2011 08:36