Noisy Air

A categorized list of useful and informative resources specified to OSX (+) development.

Threads / Multiprocessing

• A Guide to Threading on Leopard(By Colin Wheeler of Cocoa Samurai). A thurough post on how threads are implemented in OSX. Useful information about NSRunloops. The English itself could use a little editing (I find this kind of stuff distracting).

• Safe, threaded design and inter-thread communication (By Matt Gallagher of Cocoa Programming with Love).

• Invoking other processes in Cocoa (By Matt Gallagher of Cocoa Programming with Love).

• Introduction to OpenCL (from MacResearch).
• All Aboard Grand Central (By Drew McCormack at Mac Research)  Grand Central is the new threading model in Snow Leopard. 

Objective-C Language and Core Cocoa

• Hello Brave New World (By Drew McCormack at MacResearch). A starting place for new Cocoa developers. Drew puts a scientfic spin on the material which is nice, however the pace may be too slow for some.

• Classy Cocoa (By Drew McCormack at MacResearch). Part 2 of Drew's introduction. Covers object oriented concepts (objects, classes, etc) specific to Cocoa.

• Method names in Objective-C (By Matt Gallagher of Cocoa Programming with Love).

• Rules to avoid retain cycles (By Matt Gallagher of Cocoa Programming with Love). Proper memory management is critical.  This article shows how to avoid leaking memory via retain cycles.

• Cocoa Application Startup (By Matt Gallagher of Cocoa Programming with Love). A good article about how Cocoa programs are started.

• Getting Closure with Objective-C (By Drew McCormack at MacResearch). An atricle that describles how closures / blocks will work in Objective-C. They may be a powerful low-level alternative to NSOperation objects when it comes to parellelization.

• Programming With C Blocks (By Joachim Bengtsson) A very thurough tutorial on C blocks (closures) implemented in Snow Leopard. 

• Five approaches to listening, observing and notifying in Cocoa (By Matt Gallagher of Cocoa Programming with Love).

• Better integration for NSViewController and NSView (By Matt Gallagher of Cocoa Programming with Love). Matt explains how to overcome some of the lmitatins of NSViewController (compared to NSWindowController). These concerns are present at least for 10.5 (Leopard) Hopefully they will be addressed in 10.6 (Snow Leopard).

• Control and configuration of applications through Info.plist(By Matt Gallagher of Cocoa Programming with Love).

• Singletons, AppDelegates and top-level data (By Matt Gallagher of Cocoa Programming with Love). A good explanation on how to create global state within a Cocoa application.

Debugging and Profiling

• Tuning Cocoa Applications Using DTrace: Custom Static Probes and Instruments (By Brad Larson at MacResearch).

• DTrace for Cocoa Developers (By Colin Wheeler of Cocoa Samurai). A video screencast showing the use of DTrace and using custom intruments.
  

• Tuning Cocoa Applications Using DTrace: Writing Scripts (By Brad Larson at MacResearch)

• F-Script : Part I - Introduction: (By Colin Wheeler of Cocoa Samurai). F-script is a tool to inspect the state of running applications.

User Interface

• Animating a window to fullscreen on the Mac (By Matt Gallagher of Cocoa Programming with Love).

• Custom views in Interface Builder using IBPlugins(By Matt Gallagher of Cocoa Programming with Love).

Multimedia

• Revisiting an old post: Streaming and playing an MP3 stream (By Matt Gallagher of Cocoa Programming with Love). This article is just as much about multithreading as it is about mp3 streaming.