Open Kosmaczewski

(Highly geeky post ahead. You’ve been warned!)
I have found the very message that summarizes the beauty of Cocoa in a single word; see by yourselves, hereunder in line 47:

#import

// The interface of a person
@interface Person : NSObject {
NSString* firstName;
NSString* lastName;
int age;
}
@end

// The [...]

It’s fun to find out how to tackle the same task in different programming languages; in this case, it’s all about doing HTTP requests over a network: fortunately, there are networking libraries in virtually all major programming languages. In my current project, I’m generating wrappers easing the access to the core of the project itself, [...]

Version: 1.0
Author: Adrian Kosmaczewski
Date: March 18th, 2008
Programming Languages: Objective-C
Tools: Xcode, PackageMaker
Platforms: Mac OS X 10.4 “Tiger” and 10.5 “Leopard” (PowerPC & Intel)
Downloads: FlashSaver Installer and Source Code.
Licence: MIT License
The FlashSaver is a Universal Binary screen saver that loads an HTML page, itself loading a Flash movie inside. The whole is bundled as an installer, [...]

Did you knew this is possible in C++? I didn’t.

void Fun()
{
class Local
{
//… member variables …
//… member functions …
};

// … code using Local …
}

This [...]

Take a careful look at this:

#include

class Gadget
{
public:
void sayHello() const
{
std::cout

Generics in JavaScript.
Who came up with this? Let’s put things in context: JavaScript is a dynamic language. It turns out that this characteristics deeply upsets many people, particularly those who prefer to rely on a compiler to check their code for them before running it. It turns out that these guys also have a hard [...]

One of the best learning tools I have found in my career is to take someone else’s code, and to modify it slightly to see what happens, to play with it, and eventually to release that code in this blog, or send it to the original author, fixing it somehow or adding some feature:

I fixed [...]

Introduction
Charles Petzold, in its book “Code”, states the following:
In theory, application programs are supposed to access the hardware of the computer only through the interfaces provided by the operating system. But many application programmers who dealt with small computer operating systems of the 1970s and early 1980s often bypassed the operating system, particularly in dealing [...]

Every time I talk with people about Ruby on Rails in Switzerland, I almost always get the same comments, no matter what is the background of the person I’m talking to:
Yes but… what about [scalability / performance]? [I'm sure / I've read / I think / I believe / I have dreamt] that Ruby on [...]

This is a rant: I am tired of seeing virtual methods implemented in child classes that, at some point or another, call the method of the same name in the base class. For me this is a sign of poor architecture. A bad, bad smell in code.
Let’s say that you have a base class, called, [...]