28
24 Nov 2012

The Plumber's Guide to Blocks

play (41 minutes 22 MB)

Andrew Pontious talks with Wolf Rentzsch about blocks: their history, why they’re weird, and why Apple should have just gone ahead and made them an Objective-C API.

Links:

Rejected Episode Titles:

  • Carry the FU Torch
  • “You Speak German?” “Ja”
  • Instead of Writing a How-To I Wrote a Me-Too
  • I Do Not Volunteer to Write a Blog Post About It
  • Using the Word Block When You Don’t Mean Block
  • A Float, a Struct, and an Objective-C Object Pointer Walk into a Bar
  • In These Glorious Days of ARC
  • Comma YES, Comma NO, Comma YES, Comma NO
  • Beating Heart of C++
  • Beat Back the Lambda Menace
  • I’m with Wil Shipley on This
  • Trying to Rehabilitate C Itself
  • Well, That Was Wrong
  • I’m on the Siracusa Side
  • I Can’t Think of a Way That GCC Is Better
  • Blocks Are Weird, Man!
  • “I’m Gonna Have to Give Up the Dream, Aren’t I?” “Yeah”
  • I Don’t Think They’re Going to Do It, But I Think That Would Help
  • A Fine Coping Strategy, I Suppose
27
18 Nov 2012

Where mogenerator Really Picks It Up

play (56 minutes 29 MB)

Wolf Rentzsch talks with Andrew Pontious about his popular open source Core Data code generation tool, mogenerator. Plus: why Wolf may or may not be Batman.

Links:

Rejected Episode Titles:

  • Lost in the Batman References
  • Not Very Batman of Me - Maybe I Am Robin
  • I Hear That a Lot
  • mobettagenerator
  • Little Teenaged Nerdlets
  • Triggling
  • The Generation Gap
  • Where Xcode Really Falls Down
  • To Quote, I Guess, Pearl Jam
  • I Can’t Believe You Made Me Say That
  • Back Then, Kiddies, We Didn’t Have GitHub
  • A Shining Example of the Ship Early, Ship Often Mentality
  • Does That Weird Little Dance for You
  • Not Really Hurting for Template Tweaks
  • The Nice Thing About MOIDs
  • Installer Packages Are Evil
  • Prone to Breakage, Prone to Arbitrary Changes
26
10 Nov 2012

You Can't Run a Script to Test Feel

play (45 minutes 23 MB)

Andrew Pontious talks with Wolf Rentzsch about automated tests for Cocoa applications and the very particular times when he finds them useful. (Hint: not ongoing maintenance.)

Links:

Rejected Episode Titles:

  • Just Spit It Out
  • We’re Going to Violently Agree, Again
  • Bam! Every Test Failed
  • Kent Beck Can Go off and Do That on His Time
  • SYNTAX ERROR! ABORT!
  • Jamming Data Directly into Your Source Code
  • Real Programmers Do It Inline
  • As Tabular as You Can Get
  • That’s the Way I Do It, and That’s the Way I Recommend Doing It
  • Ever-Increasing List of Byzantine Steps
  • We Can’t All Be the Cool Kids
  • That’s What It Says in the Little Box
  • It’s the Lap of Luxury
  • Teststands Are Supergreat
  • Where Macro Technology Was in 1994
  • Exactly the Kind of Tests That I Find the Most Useless
  • Don’t Check for the Button
25
02 Nov 2012

We're Just Dot-J, Baby

play (51 minutes 26 MB)

Wolf Rentzsch enthuses (and Andrew Pontious mostly listens) about Cappuccino, an advanced Web framework for making desktop-class web applications, essentially “Cocoa for the Web”, with all the power and pitfalls that entails. Objective-J, anyone?

Links:

Rejected Episode Titles:

  • I Always Mean the Technology
  • A Pile of Hyperlinks
  • Cocoa for the Web
  • Leave My Dead Neuron Here for Everyone to See
  • A Little Bit of Chutzpah There
  • Studlied Up Those Ivars
  • Don’t Tell Anyone I Said That
  • Motorola “Morbidity”?
  • This Instinctive Punch to the Gut
  • It Did Come Out, and It Will Never Come Out
  • Some Facts on the Ground
  • Shit, Let’s Just Do a GPL Episode
  • After the Monolith Swallowed Them Up
  • Derailed and Forked Itself
  • Bad Idea for Me to Try to Quote Sports Quotes
  • It Jits out My Code
  • The Naughty OR
24
26 Oct 2012

Make Xibs Look Good

play (44 minutes 22 MB)

Andrew Pontious spends the entire episode with Wolf Rentzsch on followup, including someone trying AppCode based on his “recommendation” and a somewhat deeper, less rosy look at storyboards.

Links:

Rejected Episode Titles:

  • Bated Breath
  • Potpouri
  • I Live in Hope
  • The Enron of Twitter
  • “Two Disagreeable Old Men”
  • Felt Trolls
  • Long List of Duos
  • No Publicity Is Bad Publicity
  • The Yelp Business Model
  • An Intelligent Diff
  • Completely Making Stuff Up Here
  • Wikipedia Is Your Friend Here
  • That’s a Bad One
  • Tangled with Segues
  • I’d Better Shut Up, Then
23
20 Oct 2012

The Elevator Pitch for Design by Contract

play (42 minutes 22 MB)

Wolf Rentzsch uses a simple C function example with Andrew Pontious to demonstrate (in record time!) Bertrand Meyer’s Design by Contract, a cheap way to drastically improve your software quality. Could clang be the key to implementing it in Objective-C?

Links:

Rejected Episode Titles:

  • Stick a Void in There
  • Totally Not a Hand-Holding Language
  • Have You Ever Seen the Orange Spine?
  • The Very Last Word of the Very Last Chapter
  • I Can’t Imagine Stroustrup Doing That
  • Discontentment Is a Major Part of My Philosophical Bedrock
  • Turned You into the Waldorf That You Are Today
  • The Years Spin By
  • Much Like Those K&R Arguments of Yore
  • That’s Your Metaphor?
  • Pull the Ripcord
  • If You Write Out Garbage
  • The User of Your Software Didn’t Sign the Contract
  • Checking Every Pixel That Goes By
  • Reams of Imperative Code
  • No One’s Been Sued to My Knowledge
  • I Just Dumped a Boatload of Information
  • Do You Use Anything in Anger?
22
13 Oct 2012

Nibs and Xibs and Storyboards, O My

play (52 minutes 27 MB)

Andrew Pontious explores with Wolf Rentzsch the history of resources on Mac OS, starting with resource forks and ResEdit and ending with the new “storyboard” file format, which receives a shocking thumbs up! Afterwards, Wolf thinks about diffing issues.

Links:

Rejected Episode Titles:

  • Hulk-Like Levels of Rage
  • You May Want to Sit Down for This
  • ResEdit, Man!
  • The Shipped Bits
  • Everybody Had Resources
  • Everything That Could Go Wrong for a Developer Format
  • The Unreadability of It and the Undiffability of It
  • I Have Not Used Them in Anger
  • I Have One Open Right Here
  • None of This Sort of Gobbledygook
  • Informative, Upbeat, Informative, Very Upbeat, Informative Talk
  • A SmallTalk Background, of All Things
  • If You’re Lucky, Pascal
  • When You Spit It Out
  • Then, of Course, the Diffing
  • Suicide, with Interface Builder
  • Textual Diff Hell That We’re In
  • “Mr. Closure”
  • Maybe I Should Go Lie Down
21
05 Oct 2012

When the Bits Hit the Platter

play (38 minutes 19 MB)

Wolf Rentzsch talks with Andrew Pontious about data encoding and file formats, such as C structs, NSKeyedArchiver, QuickTime, ASN.1, plists, and JSON, as a way to introduce his own new untyped binary format, Lich. Plus: way too much MacGyver.

Links:

Rejected Episode Titles:

  • Atoms All the Way Down
  • If It Ends in IFF
  • Little Developer ID Certificate Dance
  • Using Hash Attacks for Good
  • Nobody Does, Except Maybe You
  • Kinda Wish It Were More Plist-y
  • JSON++
  • There’s a Freaking ASCII 9 in There!
  • You Don’t Want Your Format to Be An Easy Attack Vector?
  • You Just Have to Fuzz Harder!
  • You Were MacGyver, You Were Bruce Willis
  • MacGyver Would Have Been a Big Fan of Fuzzing
  • Business in Front, Party in the Back
  • We’ve Gone from Fuzzing to Mullets
  • You Have a Lot More to Say, But It’s Just All About MacGyver
20
29 Sep 2012

The Tabs and Spaces of Outrageous Fortune

play (41 minutes 21 MB)

Andrew Pontious, with Wolf Rentzsch, asks the question developers ask when they have nothing else to talk about: tabs vs spaces? Also: braces styles, UniversalIndentGUI, and how Xcode handles indent levels.

Links:

Rejected Episode Titles:

  • The Caramello Episode
  • One Really Painful Commit
  • If You Align Your Colons, You’re Hosed
  • If You Align Your Colons, You’re Hoseyed
  • Screw It, Spaces Forever
  • If You’re Doing the Slide
  • I’m Totally Against That
  • A Long-Time Tabs Man
  • Beaten Down, Beaten Down, Beaten Down
  • The “Aghh” Effect
  • Back in the Bad Old Days of Mac Programming
19
21 Sep 2012

In the Magical World of Threads

play (51 minutes 26 MB)

Wolf Rentzsch talks with Andrew Pontious about concurrency (with the emphasis on “con”), from the earliest Mac SMP machines to the latest software advances such as Actors.

Links:

Rejected Episode Titles:

  • With the Emphasize on “Con”
  • I Do Not Put Dancing Bunny Suits on My Notes
  • So Then We Can Piss It Away Again
  • Even the Lowly iPhone
  • I Use “Modern” in Scare Quotes
  • Back in the Bad Old Days of Web Servers
  • I Can Deal with the Edge Cases
  • The Limits of Human Thought
  • 10,000 Balls at Once
  • Puts the Kernel in the Driver’s Seat
  • You Don’t Want to Write Thread Pool Crap Code
  • Dare I Say It, “Pollyanna-ish”
  • KVO Is Not Thread-Happy
  • Something That Human Minds Need to Do
  • By Popular, I Mean No One Uses Them
  • They’re So Explicit
  • I Want to Believe
18
15 Sep 2012

Port the Present into the Past

play (50 minutes 26 MB)

Wolf Rentzsch talks with Andrew Pontious about obsolescence. Do older machines really have to be cut off from the latest OS and application updates? Does higher-level software design (and open source data formats) help or hurt?

Links:

Rejected Episode Titles:

  • Retweet Away to That Good Night
  • RAM Used to Be My Bottleneck
  • Confusing You With That Other Andrew
  • Core Data in a Jar
  • All This Dancing Around Doesn’t Come for Free
  • Throwing Themselves out of Four-Story Infinite Loop Windows
  • Long Story Short: I Agree with You
  • All Those Machines That Still Light Up and Work
  • Hoping x86 Would Die a Long Time Ago
  • Which Is Terrible, and No One Should Use It
  • If You’re Lucky, You Get V-Tables
  • The Original 128K Could Think About 4,000 Objects
  • The Bad Old Days of Binary Formats
  • Straining the Future Edge of Things
17
09 Sep 2012

Then, You're Just Writing C++

play (51 minutes 27 MB)

Andrew Pontious tries with guest cohost Uli Kusterer to make the case that C++ is a perfectly acceptable language for Objective-C developers to use under certain circumstances.

Links:

Rejected Episode Titles:

  • That’s What Special Effects Are For
  • I Blog a Lot, I Tweet a Lot
  • My Normal Cohost Doesn’t Stop Himself from Telling Me When I’m Wrong
  • Cocoa’s Creeping In
  • That Once Source of Truth on the Internet
  • I Declare Everything Virtual
  • The Highlander Model of Pointers
16
02 Sep 2012

Talk Like a Developer

play (42 minutes 20 MB)

Andrew Pontious uses his new microphone to communicate with Wolf Rentzsch about…the ways developers communicate: in interviews, on the job, and on the Internet.

Links:

Rejected Episode Titles:

  • The Slanderous Things We Say
  • I’m Kind of Salivating Here
  • Cause I Like Pie
  • Gone Dependent
  • The Binary Distinction
  • Andrew’s Tips for Great Lying
  • The Saga of the Schwa
  • Hipstagrapaper
  • Time for Twitter Gossip
  • GitHub Is My Resume
  • Communication Fractal
  • I’m the Guy with the Smug Face
  • Twitter Can Be Their Interview
15
24 Aug 2012

Brave New World of Interprocess Communication

play (39 minutes 20 MB)

Wolf Rentzsch follows up with Andrew Pontious about AppleScript, Apple Events, appscript, Distributed Objects, distributed computing, JSTalk, and sandboxing’s IPC implications.

Links:

Rejected Episode Titles:

  • Woodpecker That Destroys Civilization
14
19 Aug 2012

Maintenance and the Cocoa Slide

play (39 minutes 20 MB)

Andrew Pontious explains with Wolf Rentzsch some of his maintenance best practices, so that you can perform your own “slide” with the greatest of ease. (Andrew’s audio drops occasionally throughout. Sorry, everyone!)

Links:

Rejected Episode Titles:

  • There Should Be a Song
  • Plucked Free-Range Large Dead Chickens
  • Underscore As a Warning
  • In My Heart of Efficiency Hearts
  • When You Cry Yourself to Sleep At Night (Over Efficiency Patterns)
  • The Pontious Slide
  • The Rentzsch Slide
  • To Which I Say: Yes
  • Sugar Superset
13
11 Aug 2012

AppleScript's Glorious Failure

play (53 minutes 28 MB)

Wolf Rentzsch talks with Andrew Pontious about why AppleScript is a really awesome language and why it’s basically dead. (And why you should use JSTalk instead.)

Links:

Rejected Episode Titles:

  • Disturbing Lack of Curly Braces
  • ’60s Flower Child Dream
  • You’re This Ignorant Sap!
  • Cleave Your App in Two
  • The Fun Stuff, the Rant-ish Stuff
  • Complicated Feelings About Stroustrup
  • A Technology That Needs to Die
  • Two Episodes in a Row We’re Talking About Rez
  • If You Don’t Care About Security, You’re Basically Done
  • I Thought You Said “C++ Lovin’”
12
04 Aug 2012

A Little Slice of Windows in My IDE

play (53 minutes 27 MB)

Andrew Pontious talks with Wolf Rentzsch about the JetBrains AppCode IDE, which you can use instead of Xcode to write your iOS apps.

Links:

Rejected Episode Titles:

  • Red Eye of Sauron Looking at You
  • We’ll Always Have Rez
11
29 Jul 2012

Pop Software

play (52 minutes 27 MB)

Wolf Rentzsch talks with Andrew Pontious about Mac App Store irrelevance, the Sparrow acquisition, and so-called “pop software” and its impact upon independent software developer livelihoods.

Links:

Rejected Episode Titles:

  • I’m the Guy Who Got Lucky
  • 10.8 Is Just Kind of Boring
  • Buggy Pieces of Garbage
  • I Quote the Wolf Tweets
  • There Are Forces at Work
  • Atoms from Samsung
  • Higher-Bitrate Versions of Our Software
  • The Hit Money, the Gold Rush Money
  • The Most Depressing Topic We’ve Had Yet
  • Burning Floppies
  • Furry Turtles
  • Salad Days for Non-Pop Software
10
21 Jul 2012

Not a Free-Range Developer

play (39 minutes 20 MB)

Andrew Pontious explores with Wolf Rentzsch why and for how long you should stay in the “veal pen”, whether it’s as a Twitter client developer or an iOS/Mac developer. Bonus: the cat noises are back!

Links:

Rejected Episode Titles:

  • Dave Winer and the Infinite Sadness
9
14 Jul 2012

Alien Reference Counting

play (63 minutes 24 MB)

Wolf Rentzsch enumerates with Andrew Pontious the 5 benefits and 6 issues he sees with Apple’s new Automatic Retain Count system in the longest, most anticipated episode yet!

Links:

Rejected Episode Titles:

  • I Kinda Poked the Bear There
  • Ya Take the Crumbs Where They Fall
  • Autorelease the Hounds
  • Leaky Abstractions Are a Death Sentence
  • Maintain Your ARC Happyland
  • Retain-Release Shotgun
  • New Things Have Sharp Edges
  • Weird Things That Programmers Are Doing
  • Non-Pollyanna Points