Bit Stadium:
The full-size icon is just a 512x512px png file, but things get exciting when you know that the png specification does declare ancillary chunks, including one to store text. This means that HockeyApp can pass textual information into your build at installation time without modifying the .ipa file.
Coming back to the user that taps the Install button: If the user is signed in or his UDID is present in the current browser session, then HockeyApp writes this information into the metadata of the full-size image. The new version of HockeySDK parses this metadata at the first start to automatically identify the user. Thereby the SDK utilizes the same URL scheme that we introduced with HockeySDK 3.5, allowing for a seamless fallback if the user was not signed in or installed the app through iTunes or Xcode.
Developer Tool HockeyApp iOS
Wolf Rentzsch:
ARC has a trick that keep returned objects out of autorelease pools if both the caller and callee are ARC.
This has been well advertised, but he links to the relevant runtime source code:
To summarize, callerAcceptsFastAutorelease() inspects the caller’s instructions and uses it to determine at runtime whether it needs to actually put the returned object in the autorelease pool or if it’s on the same ARC-team and it can be skipped (speeding things up).
The related Twitter conversation also revealed some interesting details. For example, the autorelease pool optimization initially did not work for +[NSDate date]. Its implementation calls gettimeofday(), and something about this confused Clang’s optimizer so that it did not generate a tail call, without which the ARC optimization can’t work.
Automatic Reference Counting (ARC) Clang Compiler Memory Management Objective-C Open Source Optimization Programming
Robbie Hanson:
You cannot store a plain-old NSString in Core Data. It must be wrapped inside a NSManagedObject. Why? Because of the mandate above. An NSString is immutable. And Core Data wants to update the object you have in your hand, at the moment the context merges changes from another context. And it can’t change an immutable object. So it must wrap it inside something else, and change that.
[…]
This also has implications on threading. Why is it not safe to pass a NSManagedObject to background threads? Because that darn NSManagedObjectContext may mutate the thing at any time. So now threading becomes a nightmare. The fact is, the rules for NSManagedObject don’t follow the same rules you have for all other objects. Developers understand mutable vs immutable. Especially in objective-c where there are often 2 versions of a class, one mutable and one immutable. And developers understand the implications concerning threading: “Don’t be mutating something on one thread if it’s being used on another.” This is something we’ve lived with for a long time, and we’re quite adept at solving these problems. But NSManagedObject presents a whole new set of problems. We can’t just wrap one of these things in a lock, or only access it through a serial queue. Because NSManagedObjectContext isn’t going to follow our rules. It won’t play nicely, and so we’re forced to play entirely by its rules.
In contrast:
YapDatabase doesn’t use NSManagedObject, or any similar kind of silliness. You can store plain-old NSObjects. This includes your own NSObject subclasses, as well as the usual suspects such as NSString, NSNumber, UIColor, UIImage, etc. As long as the object can somehow be serialized & deserialized you’re good to go. This could be via NSCoding, or any other way you want such as JSON serialization. It’s completely configurable.
[…]
YapDatabase will never mutate any of your objects. Ever. This gives you complete control over your objects, and how & when you access and mutate them. You know, the way you’re used to dealing with objects.
YapDatabase looks really interesting. I skimmed the wiki to try to figure out the general architecture. It’s based on SQLite, which it uses as a collection-key-value store. In contrast to Core Data, it’s quasi-schemaless, although it does have some support for relationships.
It looks like there are four different mechanisms for selecting/filtering objects:
Core Data Full-Text Search iOS Mac Objective-C Open Source Programming SQLite YapDatabase
