A few episodes ago Alex Lindsay mentioned that his company was going to be hosting a one week Commuter iOS Class at their San Francisco offices so their team could come up to speed developing applications for iOS devices. The class would be taught by the folks from Big Nerd Ranch. Usually the BNR folks teach classes from their monastery at a secret location just outside Atlanta, Georgia. Having them venture out to San Francisco; wow, what an opportunity. Oh, did I mention that Alex Lindsay also announced that there were a limited number of spots open to the unwashed masses to attend and the class would be held from 2:00 p.m. until 10:00 p.m. each day so folks could continue to do at least part of their day jobs.

All in all this just sounded too good to pass up so I fired off an e-mail to the folks at BNR to let them know I wanted to attend. My fingers were crossed because I know how quickly their classes fill up. Needless to say I wouldn’t be writing this post if I didn’t get in.

So, I’m off to the Pixel Corps offices later this month to soak up some more iOS goodness. Hope to see a few of you there too.

BTW: Here is a link to the course description for anyone curious.

If you are planning on doing Test Driven Development (TDD) you may also want to get the following packages:

• OCMock – OCMock is an Objective-C implementation of mock objects. (http://www.mulle-kybernetik.com/software/OCMock/)
• Hamcrest – library of matchers for building test expressions (http://code.google.com/p/hamcrest/)

Other good articles on Xcode Unit Testing that I came across:

• Unit Testing with OCUnit – http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2004/04/23/ocunit.html?page=1
• Test Driving Your Code with OCUnit – http://developer.apple.com/tools/unittest.html
• Xcode unit testing articles – http://chanson.livejournal.com/tag/unit+testing
• Unit Testing with Xcode – http://www.stiefels.net/2007/05/01/unit-testing-with-xcode/

By reading through the documents references above I was able to get OCUnit up and running for one of my projects. It took a bit of experimentation, but in the end it looks like OCUnit will work just fine for doing TDD in Xcode with Objective-C. Anyone wanting to try out TDD should give it a try. The benefits for your project are significant. Go for it!

A technique that many people use to add functionality to Safari (and other Cocoa applications) is called Method Swizzling. If you want to learn more about this technique there is a terrific article explaining all the details on the CocoaDev site.

When applying the method swizzling technique you may find that the linker complains about unresolved classes and won’t link your bundle. This issue usually crops up when you try swizzling a method that is in a class you learned about by running class-dump or by using FScript. If you run into this problem bring up the project properties in Xcode and add -undefined dynamic_lookup to the Other Linker Flags section.

Without this extra flag your plug-in will not link, and you will be stuck in the mud! Thanks to Aaron Harnly, author of Letterbox, for pointing this out to me in an e-mail exchange.

Both of these commands need to be typed into a Terminal.app window. You only need to do this once, as your machine will remember the settings.