Month: May 2008

View Chapters (1-5) here, get the book here .

The title of chapter 6 “Helper Objects” did not sound good. Whenever I find classes with the words Helper or Util in their name, this usually indicates a “code smell” and most of time the underlying problem is a leaky domain model. Turns out something completely different is the subject of this chapter, delegates!

They can be compared with delegates in .Net though they are being used in a different way. I’ll illustrate with a sample.

The TableView UI component deals with displaying data like a table, compare this with the .Net grid. What it displays however is not part of his responsibility, this behaviour can be added though by using delegates. The tableView has a delegate member which you can set, if that object implements methods which map to delegate methods of the tableView they will be called, otherwise they won’t. This means that you don’t need to implement everything, just what you need.

I think in .Net this behaviour would be implemented by using interfaces. So if you had your own grid component, it’s datasource could be set to something of type IDatasource which would provide the necessary functionality that would be called by the grid component.

Overall this is off course a powerful feature, though implementing it requires attention, misspelling the method name means that your method won’t be called and you won’t get any errors. The author states that the best way is to look at the documentation and copy paste the method signatures in your code.

Chapter 7 “Key-Value Coding; Key-Value Observing”.

A short chapter, only 12 pages, but it seems to be a core concept. If you have an instance variable foo in class Bar, you can have other objects be notified of changes to it. This can be compared to the .Net INotifyPropertyChanged interface and its interweaving with databinding. Since the observers call the methods valueForKey: and setValue:forKey: you need to make sure your code follows the strict naming convention to get this functionality.

If you are changing the observed instance variable in methods you need to call the methods willChangeValueForKey: before changing it and didChangeValueForKey after you’ve changed it to alert the observers of the change. If you find that too much work just call the setter of the instance instead of changing it directly.

- (int)foo
{
    return foo; 
} 
 
- (void)setFoo(int) x
{
    foo =  x;
}

A handy shortcut to write a property is to use the @property and @synthesize which do all the work for you, the above code can thus be replaced by a simple

@property(readwrite) int foo;

in the header file and

@synthesize foo;

in the implementation.

Overall familiar material, I’ve seen this in .Net and it’s available to me in Objective-C excellent! There even is a valueForKeyPath: method that traverses the object tree i.e: spouse.scooter.modelName.

Chapter 8, NSArrayController.

In this chapter all you’ve seen so far comes back, but in a different way. In the previous chapter you had to write a lot of plumbing to get your list of objects to display and be editable. The NSArrayController however can help you on this, it allows user interface components be bound using chapter 7’s techniques. You can automatically add and delete objects, display them and edit them without writing code, just hook everything up.

To solve challenge 1 for this chapter edit the sortKey to be personName.length and selector to compare:. I’ve attached the code for those interested.

RaiseMan – Chapter 8.zip (69.85 kb)

KVCFun – Chapter 7.zip (53.38 kb)

SpeakLine – Chapter 6.zip (59.93 kb)

DelegateResize – Chapter 6 Challenge 1.zip (47.51 kb)

ToDoApplication – Chapter 6 Challenge 2.zip (57.66 kb)

Earlier this week I purchased this book: Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X since I wanted to get an introduction on how to develop native applications for OS X. It’s the most recently published one on the issue and got mentioned on MacRumors.

In a series of small posts I’ll put down some notes for myself here and anyone who is interested can read along.

Chapter one gives you some background on the language, what tools will be used throughout the book and explains the different kinds of frameworks available in Cocoa. Nothing special here, I want to write code!?

And there’s chapter two, the author guides you through your first Objective-C program. The interface of XCode and Interface builder (IB) are explained. I was surprised to read that any method you write is public and every instance variable is protected. Also instance fields which are connected through the IB are called outlets and you designate them accordingly in your header file. Methods that can be used by user interface objects are called actions.

#import <Cocoa/Cocoa.h>
 
@interface Foo : NSObject 
{ 
    IBOutlet NSTextField *textField; 	
}  
 
- (IBAction)seed:(id)sender; 
 
- (IBAction)generate:(id)sender;

The – before the two method declarations indicate that it’s an instance method, class methods are designated with a +. The IBAction and IBOutlet are hints for the IB. NSObject is the base class for every other object. The id ‘type’ (don’t know if I am allowed to call it that way) is a pointer to basically anything.

Chapter three digs a little deeper on objects and classes. Calling methods on objects looks a bit different if you come from a Java or C# background.

MyClass* myInstance = [[MyClass alloc] init]; 
 
[myInstance doStuff]; 
 
[myInstance doStuffWith:bar];  
 
[myInstance doStuffWith:bar using:foo];

The first line first calls the constructor and init method. Both are inherited from NSObject and on the second line I call the doStuff method on myInstance. It takes some getting used to, also note the naming convention if you’re a .Net programmer methods start with a capital. Method names are also called selectors. On the third line I assume I’ve an other object called bar and it illustrates how you pass parameters with method calls. Finally the last line illustrated how multiple arguments are passed along.

I raised an eyebrow when I read that if you call a method of on objects which points to nil (null), no exception will be raised. Sure, it allows you to omit those tedious if(!= null) checks but I’ll probably pull out my hair when I’m writing more real life application and it’s not responding the way it should.

One final note for this chapter, calling methods of your base type is done in the Objective-C world by using the super keyword.

Chapter four talks about memory management. This was fairly new for me, I knew about it but I’ve only written programs in .Net (C#, Vb.Net, managed C++) or J2EE (Java) and both environments come with the garbage collector (GC) which manages memory for you. Mac OSX 10.5 introduced the GC as well, but it’s an option. If you turn it on your application will only run on 10.5 and later, so if you want to target previous versions you’ll have to release and retain yourself.

It was an interesting read, I never had seen an example of how memory can be managed in code you write. I’ll probably just turn the GC on for stuff I write. The chapter ends with stating that you should now have a basic understanding of Objective-C and Cocoa and that the next chapters will focus on the different frameworks you can use to build your applications.

Chapter five introduces some user interface components available in the IB (buttons, textboxes,…), nothing big here although I encourage you to write the challenge application. Challenges in the book are exercises which you should be able to write.

Attached you find the challenge exercise from chapter five (countline), the guided application (speakline) also from chapter five and the lottery application from chapter three and four.

CountLine.zip (55.52 kb)

lottery.zip (16.43 kb)

SpeakLine.zip (52.62 kb)

Also I apologize for the layout of the code in this post I’ll fix that as soon as I can, Objective-C isn’t supported by default 🙂 .