A little off topic, but a good tip none the less…

Apple recently released Safari 4 beta and if you haven’t given it a try, I highly recommend you do.
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Okay, so figuring out how to unwind an Objective-C object into its base representation goes against all that is object-oriented programming, however, it’s interesting none-the-less.

In Objective-C there is a directive, @defs(), that outputs (at compile time) the list of instance variables for a class. We can use this list to create a C structure with the variables of a specified class.
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I’ve been on the hunt for an open source screen cature tool for the Mac. I finally found what I was looking for, a tool that in which you can specify the exact size of the capture window. Let me explain…

In the process of creating screenshots to accompany applications submitted to the App Store, you can include up to 5 images. Although the images can be anything you like, typically the images consist of screenshots of an application running in the iPhone simulator. When working with the simulator there are two sizes used most frequently, 320w x 460h (Apple recommends not to show the status bar across the top) and 480w x 320h (landscape mode).
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Beyond the settings you can access from the Preferences menu of Xcode, there are a number of configurable options that can be set using the defaults command from a terminal window.

Two of the settings that I have configured are to beep when a left bracket ( ] ) is entered without a matching right bracket, and second, to increase the number of entries in the recent projects menu (File menu, Recent Projects).
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Although covered many other places on the net, I recently had to make a change to the name that Xcode automagically inserts when creating new files, so I figured I’d also pass on this tip to readers of this blog as well.

By default, Xcode inserts a company name something similar to the following in all new source files (.m .h etc):
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While working on an iPhone application recently, I needed to convert a date read from an XML stream that was in the following format: 20081122 to a nicely formatted string for display on the device: Saturday November 22, 2008.
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In the first post on working with dates several of the examples use the “old style” date format syntax. The examples work, however, I want to show an additional example that uses the ICU (International Components for Unicode) library for format strings.
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