Articles on (mostly) iOS development, by Nick Randall

Latest content

• 20 Years of Gmail

  • google
  • tech industry

  March, 2024

  A look back at the launch of Gmail and the peak of Google.

• Performance of Automatic Equality Checks

  • objc
  • runtime
  • swift

  March, 2024

  Testing the speed of automated equality in both Objective-C and Swift.

• Ivars and Automatic Object Equality

  • objc
  • runtime

  October, 2023

  Inspecting instance variables using the Objective-C runtime for automatic object equality and hashing.

• Tech Talk on KVO

  • objc
  • kvo
  • tech talk

  April, 2022

  A tech talk from the archives, extolling the virtues of Key-Value Observing.

• EV Touring in Europe

  • electric cars
  • europe

  March, 2022

  Lessons learned from a few road trips in Europe with an electric car.

• Dictionary-Backed Objects

  • objc
  • runtime

  May, 2021

  An Objective-C class with dynamic storage. Describes how to create method implementations at runtime, using functions such as resolveInstanceMethod and class_addMethod.

• Parsing JSON Safely

  • objc
  • runtime
  • parsing

  February, 2021

  How to ensure that a malformed network payload can never crash your app.

• State Machines in Swift

  • swift

  January, 2021

  Implementing a trivial state machine in Swift.

• Implementing Key-Value Coding

  • objc
  • runtime
  • properties

  August, 2020

  Using the Objective-C runtime to read and write property values dynamically.

• Type Encodings Explained

  • objc
  • runtime
  • types

  July, 2020

  The @encode directive and how Objective-C encodes type details.

• Inspecting Objective-C Properties

  • objc
  • runtime
  • properties

  June, 2020

  Using the Objective-C runtime to inspect properties of a class, and creating a convenience wrapper to work with them.

• The Objective-C Runtime in Practice

  • objc
  • runtime

  May, 2020

  An introduction to the practical uses of the Objective-C runtime.