Friday, February 21, 2014
Soroush Khanlou (via Marcel Weiher):
All of these nuances in the API cause KVO to embody what is known as a pit of failure rather than a pit of success. The pit of success is a concept that Jeff Atwood talks about. APIs should be designed so that they guide you into using them successfully. The should give you hints as to how to use them, even if they don’t explain why you should use them in that particular way.
KVO does none of those things. If you don’t understand the subtleties in the parameters, or if you forget any of the details in implementation (which I did, and only noticed because I went back to my code to reference it while writing this blogpost), you can cause horrible unintended behaviors, such as infinite loops, crashes, and ignored KVO notifications.
I wish Cocoa didn’t have APIs that require you to use KVO.
Cocoa Key-Value Observing (KVO) Objective-C Programming
Marcus Zarra:
Unlike a relationship, there is no way to pre-fetch a fetched property. Therefore, if you are going to fetch a large number of entities and then desire to access the fetched property for those properties, they are going to be fetched individually. This will drastically impact performance.
Fetched Properties are only fetched once per context without a reset. This means that if you add other objects that would qualify for the fetched property after the property has been fetched then they won’t be included if you call the fetched property again. To reset the fetched property requires a call to -refreshObject:mergeChanges:.
Cocoa Core Data iOS Mac Programming
Benedict Cohen:
parentContext was introduced alongside a new concurrency model. To use parentContext both the parent and child contexts must adopt the new concurrency model. But the problem addressed by parentContext is not concurrency. Concurrency is just a problem, albeit a significant one, that needed to be solved to for parentContext to be implemented. The intent of parentContext is to improve the [atomicity] of changes. parentContext allows changes to be batch up and committed en masse. This has always been possible by using multiple NSManagedObjectContext, but parentContext allows for improved granularity of the batching.
[…]
parentContext does provides features that simplify a handful of use cases. Unfortunately the short comings of parentContext mean that it can not be adopted piecemeal. The top of the Core Data stack are managed objects. A good model will provide an interface that works at a high level of abstraction. Creating such an interface requires encapsulating implementation detail. The way that Core Data is designed means that the natural place for this code is in managed object subclasses. Because parentContext affects the behaviour of managed objects adopting it makes it difficult to write managed object subclasses without knowing the context hierarchy in which they’ll be used. Proceed with extreme caution!
Cocoa Core Data iOS Mac Programming
Speaking of keyboards, there’s now an SDK for adding the Fleksy keyboard to iOS apps. It’s like TextExpander, where each app has to embed the code separately, since iOS doesn’t allow this sort of customization at the system level.
Developer Tool Fleksy iOS Keyboard
