48
04 May 2013

I Don't Finish the Books

play (46 minutes 22 MB)

Andrew Pontious talks with Wolf Rentzsch about the resources we use as developers to learn: books, Stack Overflow, Twitter, blogs, and, yes, conferences like WWDC.

Links:

Rejected Episode Titles:

  • I’ve Gone with the Dub Dub
  • An Integral Part of the Process
  • That’s Programming for You
  • Don’t Do Step 4
  • The Current Reigning Champion
  • What’s Wrong with Stack Overflow
  • A General Grumbling
  • Questions I Ask Are Generally Pretty Much Ignored
  • A Little Mini-WWDC
  • Tongues Would Be Looser
  • The Search Is Kind of Crappy
  • I Forgot I Could Do That
  • If Labs Are Your Plan A, You Should Have a Plan B
  • You’re Leaving Out the Primary Reason, Which Is Stump
  • I Don’t Eat the Whole Thing
  • Short Attention Span Programming
47
27 Apr 2013

Slinging CGRects Around

play (51 minutes 25 MB)

Wolf Rentzsch continues the conversation with Andrew Pontious about Auto Layout: its yays and its nays, Wolf’s inevitable new GitHub projects to ease its usage, and alternatives such as ReactiveCocoaLayout.

Links:

Rejected Episode Titles:

  • I Guess This Is the Gray Hair Showing
  • Which May Or May Not Be a Good Thing
  • “I Don’t Really Care” … “Fair Enough”
  • Which Doesn’t Solve Virtually Any of the Problems You Mentioned
  • I’d Rather Just Move On with My Life
  • iTunes Schmitunes
  • You Don’t Need iTunes When You Have otool
  • I Don’t Tend to Think in Terms of Cartesian Coordinate Systems
  • Top Left Is the Way to Your Heart
  • It Feels Like Graphics Code
  • I Just Totally Stay Away from IB
  • One Mutable Field That’s Ironically Named Constant
  • A Little Alarming
  • Weird, Attached Purple Window
  • Where the Tools Are Nicer
  • Your Debug Logs Will Be All the Richer
  • It’s Not a Real Edge Cases Episode Unless Wolf Ships a GitHub Repository
  • The First One Is So Dumb and Simple
  • I Guess You Control the Horizontal and the Vertical
  • I Attacked This in So Many Different Ways
  • I Spent Some Quality Time in Stack Overflow
  • It Flies off My Fingers
  • No End of Trouble
  • Once You Have Dictionary Literals, It’s Ehwuwhuugh
  • Our Magical Friend
  • It Shrinks My Code
  • You Were Talking Pretty Fast
  • No Magic Bullet There
46
20 Apr 2013

Rectangles on a String

play (47 minutes 23 MB)

Andrew Pontious talks with Wolf Rentzsch about Auto Layout from the newbie’s perspective. In this, he’s aided by Erica Sadun’s book iOS Auto Layout Demystified. (Interface Builder winds up being less helpful.)

Links:

Rejected Episode Titles:

  • You Totally Stole My Topic
  • Lace All Our Podcasts with Wrong Information
  • I Don’t Normally Buy Books
  • A Gentleman and a Scholar, but Maybe Less of a Scholar
  • It’s Like NSPredicate
  • I Never Do That
  • I Would Even Go So Far as To Call It Infuriating
  • Edge Cases City
  • You Only Have One Shot
  • You Can’t Do That Anymore Because of Core Animation
  • I Already Have Code That Works
  • Work Around Xcode Being Bad
  • I’ve Got Big Quotes Going on in My Hands Here
  • I’ve Complained About Xcode All the Way Along
  • This One They Really Screwed the Pooch
  • I Find Listening to Our Podcast Totally Unbearable
  • Possibly the Last Chapter Will Be Really Bad
  • Layout Code Tends to Be So Terrible
  • Attractive Nuisance
  • We Will NEVER DO THAT
45
13 Apr 2013

One Little Package of Hate

play (50 minutes 24 MB)

Wolf Rentzsch talks with Andrew Pontious about how OS X’s installer technology is dangerous, complicated, obsolete, under-documented, and feature-poor.

Links:

Rejected Episode Titles:

  • We Will Go Through Hell with You This Week, Wolf
  • Some Trauma to Our RSS Feed
  • I Take Exception to That
  • The Secret Chapter
  • A Young and Naive Pup
  • Breaking in New and Exciting Ways
  • Every Package Has a Payload
  • Tar Always Does the Right Thing
  • It’s Not C3PO
  • Australian-Style Parallel Evolution Thing
  • One of Them’s Got “Tape” in Its Name
  • I’m Not Going to Download 9 GB of an Installer
  • I Have No Problems with It
  • I Guess I Can’t Call Them Platters Anymore
  • An Attractive Nuisance
  • These Stinky Projects
  • Tons of Terrible Pain Here
  • Here, Have a Tissue
  • I Witnessed This the Most Fun Way Possible
  • This Horrible Nesting of Russian Dolls
  • Famously Buggy
  • Look into the Eyes of Madness
  • ClickToFlashbacks
  • All Bad, All the Time
  • Just as Bad as I’d Hoped
  • Layers of Horrendous Horrendous Horrendous
44
06 Apr 2013

Putting Your Scent on the Code

play (38 minutes 22 MB)

Andrew Pontious talks with Wolf Rentzsch about editor round-tripping: taking source code with one format, such as K&R-style braces, converting it losslessly to another format, and back. Are the trade-offs worth it?

Links:

Rejected Episode Titles:

  • Why Don’t We Talk About Having a Shorter Show a Little More
  • I See My Cat Has an Opinion
  • This Terrible, Terrible Format
  • The Mid-Nineties Holy Grail
  • That’s the Last We’ll Be Talking About UML
  • Very Specific, Very Peculiar Ways
  • A Dagwood Sandwich of Methods and Comments
  • Regularized the Heck out of Them
  • NOT HyperCard
  • Or a Cat Got on the Keyboard
  • No One Should Get Excited
  • It Feels Like Hundreds
  • Stamping out All of the Idiosyncrasies
  • My Quite Bubbly, Enthusiastic Take
  • The Bad Old Days of Project Builder
  • A C Source File That’s Shaped like the Death Star
  • Like a Recursive Can of Worms
  • The Way to Be a Happy Engineer
  • Urinating on the Code, Metaphorically
43
30 Mar 2013

Don't Expect Anything To Work

play (50 minutes 24 MB)

Kyle Sluder, who works on OmniOutliner at The Omni Group, talks to Wolf Rentzsch about disassembling, Core Animation, KVO, Auto Layout and more.

Links:

Rejected Episode Titles:

  • More of a Little Man
  • Core Animationy Goodness
  • I’m Being Diplomatic
  • I Had Been Raised on Intel Syntax
  • More S’s and X’s and Q’s and L’s
  • Oh Wow There’s a Lot of Options Here
  • I Take Great Advantage How Objective-C Code Looks Once It’s Been Decompiled
  • A Permanently Open Disassembly of AppKit
  • There Were Many Radars Which Were Filed
  • I Dug As Deep As I Have To — You Can’t Be Very Shallow
  • You’re Almost Certainly Not Working In Assembly Yourself
  • Blonde, Brunette, _msgSend
  • The Golden Path Has Gotten Wider
  • We Have This Hybrid Beast
  • Blatted Into Place
  • Touching The DOM Is Expensive
  • It Would Be Like Swallowing A Whale
42
24 Mar 2013

In a UI Tarpit

play (47 minutes 23 MB)

Andrew Pontious starts talking with Wolf Rentzsch about why native application UIs are better than website UIs, but ends up talking about why there are no ads in most iOS apps.

Links:

Rejected Episode Titles:

  • Native vs. Web
  • It’s Probably Just Me
  • I’ll Do Your Dirty Work for You
  • I’m Not Sure What the Moral of That Is
  • Is It Dying Again Yet?
  • Cursed or Charmed Mode
  • A Red Dwarf
  • It Doesn’t Matter Because Apple Doesn’t Have It
  • Apple’s Addicted to It
  • They Only Change When They’re On the Way Down
  • Is That Like Gazpacho?
  • Please Email Somebody Else
  • The Way People Throw Links Everywhere
  • A Series of Rectangles Filled Up with Controls
  • Always Tables
  • When I Look at Things a Certain Way
  • The Killer Detail
  • One Painting After Another
  • Not Quite a Browser
  • I’m Glad You Mentioned Ads
  • Siracusa-Style Blindness
  • A Poverty of Design
  • You’re Lucky to See a Line of Text
  • How to Jam Their Crap Content into There
  • A Much Harsher Environment to Survive In
41
16 Mar 2013

The Tofu Scale

play (54 minutes 26 MB)

Wolf Rentzsch talks with Andrew Pontious about philosophical and practical aspects of branching in version control.

Links:

Rejected Episode Titles:

  • Start Going Down the List
  • Taller Than Can Fit on My 27” Display
  • CVS Is Horrible and You Shouldn’t Use It
  • The Next Two Ones Are Also Horrible
  • I Don’t Know What Magic It Did
  • With Subversion, I Wasn’t Very Branchy
  • Bad Things Come in Threes
  • Not Strictly a Horrible Thing
  • I’ve Often Been Complimented on My Large Binary Assets
  • The Philosophy of Branches
  • Why We Do the Podcast, So We Can Get Ourselves in Trouble
  • It’s Firm on Top
  • I Don’t Know What Type of Tofu She’s Eating
  • The First Release Is Always Perfect
  • The Land of Cheap Branches
  • Merge Early, Merge Often
  • Did You Write Your Own Spell-Checker?
  • He Teaches Git, He Writes About Git
  • You Can and Should Deploy Immediately
  • You Gotta Have People
  • You’ll Commit When I Tell You to Commit
  • Cropped Up Like a Virus
  • I Hate to Use the Word “Submodule”
  • And I Can Go on My Merry Way
  • Just Want to Use the Freakin’ Library
  • Helping the Noobs
  • I Am Still Skeptical, Shocker
40
09 Mar 2013

Heroic Measures

play (48 minutes 23 MB)

Andrew Pontious talks with Wolf Rentzsch about how software developers often have to go “above and beyond” as part of their work.

Links:

Rejected Episode Titles:

  • I Would Call That a General Glow
  • This is Derailing Rather Rapidly
  • It Captures the Beginner’s Mind
  • Chocolate Frosted Ego Batter
  • I Have a Cape and Everything
  • “Realistic” Is in Air Quotes
  • I’m Totally Butchering Agile
  • We’ll Just Throw More Bodies at It
  • Kind of a Squishy Definition
  • Anything You Do That Isn’t Sustainable
  • I’m Not a Lawyer
  • Anxiety Is a Good Harbinger
  • I’m Going to Upgrade Myself
  • Your Definition of Heroism Falls a Bit Short
  • How Much You Neglect the Other Parts of Your Life
  • A “Corporate Stooge” as Dan Benjamin Would Call It
  • That Sounds Horrifying
  • The Way a Lot of People Do It, the Way Your Friends Do It
  • The Air They Breathe
  • Now You’re in Charge, Go Make This Work
  • Almost Kind of an Anti-Heroic Measure
  • You Need Heroic Management
  • Treated Like Kings
  • I Mean, They’re in California, Right?
  • Outside the Apple Vernacular
  • Come in or You’re Fired
  • There Were Sprints, Is What I’m Saying
  • Don’t Get Stuck There
  • Not Zero-Based
39
02 Mar 2013

Productivity Porn

play (48 minutes 23 MB)

Wolf Rentzsch talks with Andrew Pontious about his favorite Getting Things Done-oriented applications, such as OmniFocus, TaskPaper, and a few surprises. Plus: Charlie’s Angels villains.

Links:

Rejected Episode Titles:

  • I Could’ve Made Some Sort of Time Dilation Joke There
  • All This Philosophical Crap
  • A Pretty Good Metaphor for GTD Itself
  • The Yaks Keep Regrowing the Fur
  • What’s a Good Monster That Comes Back from the Dead Repeatedly…Jesus?
  • There’s Limits to the Craziness Here
  • When It’s Occupying My Dreams
  • I’m Probably Insulting More People, Again
  • You Don’t Have Any Time for Porn
  • Be Wrong for the First Few Minutes
  • Like a Good Little GTDer
  • They’re Only Headlines
  • That’s Where the Secret List Is!
  • That’ll Suck Your Energy Right Down
  • But I Don’t Care About That
  • Cutting Through the Noise of Your 100+ Projects
  • I Really Want Day N
  • Freely Use My Fork
  • A Sensory Deprivation Tank for Your Mac
38
23 Feb 2013

A Programmer and a Puzzler

play (43 minutes 20 MB)

Andrew Pontious along with Wolf Rentzsch talks about Andrew’s experiences with text adventure games: a bit of their history, what it was like to develop them, and his eventual deal-breaking frustration with puzzles.

Links:

Rejected Episode Titles:

  • No, That’s Not It
  • Like a Leaden Weight
  • Something from My Past, My Mysterious Past
  • GO WEST
  • Why People Don’t Love Us
  • Violence Isn’t the Answer to This One
  • A Certain Amount of Guess-the-Verb
  • Very Siri-Like
  • The Siracusa Argument
  • My Inherent Skepticism
  • A Bajillion Verbs That You Could Choose
  • You Will Be Eaten by a Grue
  • Let’s Say You Have a Kazoo
  • Getting the Ambience Straight
  • Typing in the Same Verb Two Hundred Times
  • Deflating the Stakes a Bit
  • Actually Part of the Problem
  • Kind of Being a Smart-Ass
  • More Like Debugging Than Programming
  • That Is Show Business
  • I Believe You Called It a Wasteland
37
16 Feb 2013

In the Tree of Your TODO List

play (47 minutes 23 MB)

Wolf Rentzsch, a GTD cultist, and Andrew Pontious, who’s GTD-curious, talk about Getting Things Done in their fluffiest episode yet.

Links:

Rejected Episode Titles:

  • We’re the Weird Ones Here
  • Kind of a Fluffy Episode
  • My Ears Perked Up
  • So, When Do We Get Divorced?
  • Described in Such a Programmer-y Fashion
  • I’m Driving to Work, What Do You Want Me to Do?
  • Getting It Out of Your Brain
  • We May Need to Do Some Post Editing Here
  • It Feels So Much Like a Cult
  • I Just Hate Fred
  • The Not-So-Bright Part of You
  • The Disagreements I’ve Had with Getting Things Done
  • I Have Internet Pretty Much Anywhere
  • The Big Dog
  • I Have My Own Little Bubble
  • It Makes Me Jones for the Other Ones
  • That Should Be Setting off Red Alerts for You Right There
  • Danger, Andrew Pontious!
  • OmniFocus Is a Very Big Hammer
  • One of the Reasons Why Your Life Sucks
  • “Wrestle Some Pandas”
  • I Like Merlin Mann
36
09 Feb 2013

A Zeno's Paradox of Authentication

play (56 minutes 30 MB)

Wolf Rentzsch talks to Andrew Pontious about practical OAuth: how it works, tips and tricks about how to integrate it into your apps, and the ups and downs of version 2.0.

Links:

Rejected Episode Titles:

  • The Grumpier Side of Software Development
  • I Was Expecting Starsky and Hutch to Come Sooner Rather Than Later
  • I’m American, I Don’t Know Anything
  • There Was an Hour Where It Went Haywire
  • Matt Gemmel’s MGTwitterEngine of Yore
  • Back When the World Was Wonderful
  • A Session Fixation Bug
  • Hexadecimal Jokes Are the Worst
  • Here You Go, These Are the Keys to the Car
  • Asking Permission to Ask Permission
  • Hoping That Everything’s OK
  • In Your Little Web View
  • The Primitive, Obvious Way to Do It
  • Call Me, and I Know How to Handle It
  • This Random String You Don’t Look Too Closely At
  • Web Views Are Very Hungry to Be Dropped Onto
  • Refrigerators Are Tweeting Now
  • Finally Embrace Our Web View Overlords
  • I Recommend Checking Out My Little Fork
  • Their Scope Got Bigger
  • Done by Writing in the Sky Using Your Little Biplane That Shoots Clouds out Its Rear
  • Vendors Can Later On Come and Plug Their Holes
  • There’s a Lot of Money Involved When Things Are Open to Interpretation
  • We’ve Been Swearing Throughout the Podcast
  • This Is Going to Be a Lot of Pain
  • Don’t Put All Your Eggs in One Security Basket
  • Apple Lawyers, You Didn’t Hear Anybody Say That on This Podcast
  • Time Is Weird to Me
35
03 Feb 2013

Their Job Is to Break It

play (43 minutes 21 MB)

Andrew Pontious, with second guest cohost Peter Hosey, talks about the strange and wacky world of quality assurance engineers.

Links:

Rejected Episode Titles:

  • You’re Addicted or You’re a Teetotaler
  • Experiencing an Interactive Story Through Terminal.app
  • Every Orthogonal Direction
  • Isn’t Really Something You Want to Win
  • Opening and Closing the CD Tray All Day
  • Can’t They Get Some Lego Mindstorms Shit Up in Here?
  • Drudgery and Hypervigilance
  • Developers Love to File Bugs
  • Now We’re Going to Dogfood It
  • Sample Other People’s Dogfood Once in a While
  • Someone Who Likes to Press the Button
  • Definitely a Bus-Factor Problem
  • They Need to Cut It Down
  • They’re Not Just Drones
  • Failures Roll Downhill
  • They Tend to Have to Just Deal
  • Automate the Hell out of Everything
  • It’s a Downpayment, Instead of Technical Debt
  • Test the App as a Black Box
  • Sometimes It’s Just Straight-Up Broken
34
27 Jan 2013

Xcode, I Want to Get Organized!

play (58 minutes 28 MB)

Andrew Pontious, accompanied by Wolf Rentzsch, lets loose in this extra-long episode with his second Xcode 4 rant, this time focusing on Xcode’s overstuffed Organizer window.

Links:

Rejected Episode Titles:

  • You Can Do That, Why Would I Want To?
  • Apple Does Not Focus on the Past
  • Got It In One
  • You Have This Hobson’s Choice
  • Aping CodeWarrior Functionality
  • Entropy Always Wins
  • TextMate Was Going Like Gangbusters
  • Xmate
  • We’ve Bitten Off As Much As We Can Chew
  • INVOKE THE JAVA!
  • It Becomes like a Treasure Hunt
  • It Really Afflicts Me
  • The Majority of My Little Repositories Here Are in Red
  • Volumes, Blah, Blah Blah Blah
  • I Meant, I Love Them!
  • LIke a Second Skin
  • I Don’t Let Xcode Touch the Version Control
  • GitX Acts as My Weapon of Choice
  • Do You Use Git in Anger?
  • That Thing You Do Between Checkins
  • You Know It’s Going to Beachball
  • It’s Not Great, but It’s Not Really a Problem
  • Too Much of a Kitchen Sink
  • I Really Like Windows
  • That’s How You Did Things in the 80s
  • Everything Is Visible All the Time
33
19 Jan 2013

Flattry Will Get You Everywhere

play (41 minutes 20 MB)

Wolf Rentzsch along with Andrew Pontious uses the Swedish micropayment service Flattr as an excuse to talk about inter-application communication yet again as well as introduce Compliment, his app to make it easier for other apps to integrate with Flattr.

Links:

Rejected Episode Titles:

  • Flattr and Compliment
  • A Little Foreshadowing
  • That’s Recursive Enough for Me, Let’s Pop the Stack
  • FU, Chad Sellers! FU!
  • Siracusa as the Podfather
  • A Way to Index Audio
  • I’m Totally a Car Guy
  • I Don’t Know If I Should Still Put the Mac in There
  • The Great Vowel Shortage of the Late 2009s
  • Euros, Because They’re Swedish
  • Flattrific
  • That Sounds Like Growling Pains
  • I’m Trying to Think of How iCloud Would Fit into That
  • Pasteboard-RPC
  • That’s Like Holding Back Humanity
  • There’s Only So Many Developers
32
12 Jan 2013

The Case Against Xcode Plugins

play (38 minutes 21 MB)

Andrew Pontious covers with Wolf Rentzsch the logic behind why Apple won’t introduce a public Xcode plugin architecture. Plus: how Mike Lee solved the halting problem.

Links:

Rejected Episode Titles:

  • The Nicholas Sparks of Objective-C
  • Now We Have to Erase the Episode
  • Real Artists Ship
  • Fast and Loose, Baby
  • You Can Stop Thinking About It, We’re Done
  • We’re Not Regimented, Here at Edge Cases University
  • Not GC, GCC
  • They Could Go Ahead and Fuck with It
  • They Control the Horizontal, They Control the Vertical
  • Apple Pulled the AppleScript Rug Out
  • I Should’ve Just Done the Bad Thing
  • They’re Going to Sting Us, It’s Their Nature
  • If I Were Letting You Talk, Which I’m Not
  • Something Drastic, Like Blackmail Scott Forstall
  • The Path of Obsolescence
  • I Find Nothing to Disagree With Here
31
05 Jan 2013

The Turing Frights

play (46 minutes 24 MB)

Wolf Rentzsch talks with Andrew Pontious about Microsoft’s research OS, Singularity, which breaks through the stagnation of current operatings systems with innovative use of static analysis, communication channel contracts, and more.

Links:

Rejected Episode Titles:

  • Now We’re Back, and Now We’ll Be Perfect
  • The Software That Runs the Software
  • The Microsoft-Is-Borg 90s
  • The Apple Singularity Does Not Fill Me with Any More Joy
  • A Poorly-Debugged Set of Device Drivers
  • People Have Given Up
  • We’ve Talked About Other Topics out of Our Ass
  • I Hope I Never Understand It
  • It’s Not a Runtime Thing
  • Oh, Java Will Never Die
  • Makes Communications a First Class Citizen
  • There Are No Address Spaces
  • I’m Not Entirely Convinced
  • Your Binary Has to Look Behaved
  • I Tend to Sauté My Pointers, Instead of Having Them Raw
  • When Your Little Binary Starts Executing
  • VMs As We Know Them
  • I Don’t Know If That Makes a Whole Lot of Sense to You
  • Thousand Cores on a Processor
  • A Hostile Code Environment
  • I Like This from an Ideological Perspective
  • Message Passing Seems to Be a Common Thread
  • Mach Messaging Is a Real Pain in the Butt
  • A Little Bit of Sandboxing Here, a Little Bit of Grand Central Dispatch There
30
08 Dec 2012

One Ring to Cocoa-Bind Them All

play (47 minutes 25.4 MB)

Andrew Pontious explores with Wolf Rentzsch key-value coding, key-value observing, and Cocoa Bindings: what’s interesting about them, and how they can be a stack of suck. And remember: holiday break till January!

Links:

Rejected Episode Titles:

  • I’m All for Jumping Right In
  • Apple Even Has a Patent on It
  • Shut Up About Dot Syntax
  • Thunder Struct
  • Let’s Replace Your Object with Folgers Crystals
  • Everybody Wins, Everybody’s Happy
  • An Attractive Nuisance
  • Cocoa Bindings Are the Shiznit
  • Why Is This Table Acting Weird?
  • He Was Dumbfounded, He Was Flabbergasted
  • The Greatest Collection of Noobs That Apple Has Ever Seen
  • I Was Going to Go with the Fungus Analogy
  • KV O, My!
  • As You Go Higher, the Suck Gets Worse
29
02 Dec 2012

Squirting Code Across Address Spaces

play (55 minutes 28 MB)

Wolf Rentzsch talks with Andrew Pontious about mach_override (his project for dynamically overriding functions) and mach_inject (his project for cross-process code execution). You’ll never guess who uses them!

Links:

Rejected Episode Titles:

  • Our Conversations Tend to be Lopsided
  • I Don’t Think Anyone Really Took Me Seriously
  • It’s All Garbage to Me
  • I Was in More Pain Than Probably a Lot of People
  • When I Jump into a vi Screen, I Turn off the Computer
  • A Bunch of People Did the Stone Soup Thing
  • Then What Are You Doing Talking to Me?
  • if That’s Your World, It’s Really Easy to Blow Your Stack
  • Badda Bing, Badda Boom
  • Tell That to Bundles
  • MACH-STAR!
  • It Reads Like Insanity
  • “Work” Being a Relative Term
  • A Linux Personality, an OS/2 Personality
  • And That’s Not Going to Be Me
  • That Definitely Won’t Fly