Edge Cases

Edge Cases 128: Everybody's Got a Bad Parser

Thu, 16 Apr 2015 00:00:00 -0700

Andrew on Carthage and Wolf on text as a symptom. Plus: ending the show.

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Edge Cases 127: A Foundation of Chaos

Thu, 02 Apr 2015 00:00:00 -0700

Wolf on strict vs flexible foundations and Andrew on React Native.

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Edge Cases 126: Out-Microsofting Microsoft

Thu, 26 Mar 2015 00:00:00 -0700

Andrew on how Apple is the new Microsoft and Wolf on real-time systems.

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Edge Cases 125: Gradient of Information

Thu, 12 Mar 2015 00:00:00 -0700

Wolf on the why of software change and Andrew on GUI debugging tools, real and imagined.

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Edge Cases 124: Old Apple Meets New Apple

Thu, 05 Mar 2015 00:00:00 -0800

Andrew on Apple’s Swift framework problem and Wolf on bitcode for software distribution.

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Edge Cases 123: What’s the Deal with NSInteger?

Thu, 26 Feb 2015 00:00:00 -0800

Wolf on branches vs feature flags and Andrew (belatedly) on Apple’s 64-bit transition.

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Edge Cases 122: Working on the Other Side of the Country

Thu, 19 Feb 2015 00:00:00 -0800

Andrew and Wolf on working from home.

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Edge Cases 121: The Official Container Type of the Edge Cases Podcast

Thu, 05 Feb 2015 00:00:00 -0800

Wolf on subpixel text rendering and Andrew on linked lists.

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Edge Cases 120: Don't Copy That Floppy

Thu, 22 Jan 2015 00:00:00 -0800

Andrew on weak references and Wolf on physical-access malware like Thunderstrike.

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Edge Cases 119: Enough Flags to Be a United Nations

Thu, 15 Jan 2015 00:00:00 -0800

Wolf on state machines and Andrew on std::swap vs. functional programming.

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Edge Cases 118: Don't Get Cocky, Kid

Thu, 08 Jan 2015 00:00:00 -0800

Andrew on code comment-based documentation and Wolf on future-proof data formats.

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Edge Cases 117: Something Was Not Going Right

Thu, 01 Jan 2015 00:00:00 -0800

Wolf on events vs threads and Andrew on our Overcast feed issues.

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Edge Cases 116: Lingual Advancement

Thu, 18 Dec 2014 00:00:00 -0800

Andrew on Xcode 6’s unit testing improvements and Wolf on his lingual crisis of faith.

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Edge Cases 115: Light on Theory

Thu, 11 Dec 2014 00:00:00 -0800

Wolf on followup and Andrew on converting a small project to Swift.

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Edge Cases 114: Pyramid of Doom

Sat, 06 Dec 2014 00:00:00 -0800

Andrew on hackathons and Wolf on .NET’s Async/Await.

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Edge Cases 113: Who Watches the WatchKit?

Thu, 20 Nov 2014 00:00:00 -0800

Andrew talks with Wolf about the newly-released Apple WatchKit SDK.

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Rejected Episode Titles:

I’m Going to Take Over the Podcast, Mwahahah
Over Wolf’s Dead Body
Not Masquerading as a Robot
Suspiciously Binary
Talk to Me As If I’m an Idiot
Widget Watch
Put Through the Wash Cycle About a Hundred Times
Put Through the Watch Cycle
KITT, I Need You
A Device for People Who Don’t Like Taking Their Phone out of Their Pocket
Very Bricky
Beautiful Models Holding It at Exactly the Right Angle So That It Looks Cool
The First of Its Species
Literally Retina Watches in Your Eye
Don’t Do Any Math There
Weird, But That’s the Way We’re Doing It

Edge Cases 112: Naiveté as a Service

Thu, 13 Nov 2014 00:00:00 -0800

Andrew on who’s making money on the iOS App Store and Wolf on using academic resources in commercial software development.

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Edge Cases 111: “Here Be Dragons”–Style Comments

Sun, 09 Nov 2014 00:00:00 -0800

Wolf on code comments and Andrew on Appetize.io.

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Edge Cases 110: Scripting with C

Thu, 23 Oct 2014 00:00:00 -0700

Andrew on the Swift section of John Siracusa’s Yosemite review and Wolf on Playgrounds for Objective-C.

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Edge Cases 109: Race the Beam

Thu, 16 Oct 2014 00:00:00 -0700

Wolf on memory debugging and Andrew on AsyncDisplayKit.

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Edge Cases 108: Playing Jenga with Microsoft Word

Thu, 09 Oct 2014 00:00:00 -0700

Andrew on sample projects for bug reports and Wolf on rolling your own server backend.

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Edge Cases 107: A Furrier Jony Ive

Thu, 02 Oct 2014 00:00:00 -0700

Wolf on Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) and Andrew on Apple’s (growing?) tendency toward luxury products.

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Edge Cases 106: Flappy Kit

Sat, 27 Sep 2014 00:00:00 -0700

Andrew on Sprite Kit and Wolf on Macs as servers.

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Edge Cases 105: Demonolithization

Thu, 11 Sep 2014 00:00:00 -0700

Wolf on mogenerator 1.28 and Andrew on ARC debugging.

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Edge Cases 104: It Is Great for Robots

Thu, 04 Sep 2014 00:00:00 -0700

Andrew on data-driven testing and Wolf on Romantic Versioning vs Semantic Versioning.

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Edge Cases 103: Microcosm of Security

Sun, 31 Aug 2014 00:00:00 -0700

Wolf on Fat Pointers and Andrew on using Swift enums for representing errors.

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Edge Cases 102: The Grubby Particulars of the Hardware

Thu, 21 Aug 2014 00:00:00 -0700

Andrew on size classes and Wolf on field-programmable gate arrays.

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Edge Cases 101: A Program That Runs on Metal

Thu, 14 Aug 2014 00:00:00 -0700

Wolf on Unikernels and Andrew on Swift Access Control.

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Edge Cases 100: Apps for iWatch and Apple TV

Sat, 09 Aug 2014 00:00:00 -0700

Andrew Pontious talks with Wolf Rentzsch about the third-party apps that might be feasible on Apple’s unusual devices, the hypothetical iWatch and the Apple TV. Plus: the future of Edge Cases (hint: there is one).

Links:

Rejected Episode Titles:

Now You’ve Got an Inch to Play With
A Little Bit of Text and a Button
What Can You Do on a Watch?
What Nanos Do What
Overcast on My iPod Nano
Everywhere Else, I Have My Phone
Groove into a Throbbing, Shagadelic Thing
The Marble in the Maze
I Don’t Think I Said Velociraptor
Also a Hard Sell
I’m Just Going to Come Out and Say It: Pippin!
And They Got Their Asses Kicked
Now You can Play Crappy Games on Your TV
Siloed in Their Own Apps
Custom Stuff Is Always Crappy
That’s Not Quite Stories, That’s Shooting Things
A Forward-Looking Episode
Eventually I Just Stopped Swiping
Those Little Things That Vibrate
Adding Another Target Isn’t a Big Deal for Them
More Likely Under the Tim Cook Era
An App Store Machine Like the iPhone Was
That Apple Campus Is Coming Pretty Close To
They Feel More Like a Real Media Company
The Future of Edge Cases
While Still Delivering Our Blather to You

Edge Cases 99: Swift Is a Really Good Thing and a Step Back

Wed, 30 Jul 2014 00:00:00 -0700

Wolf Rentzsch talks to Andrew Pontious about the upsides (it will help advance the industry at large) and downsides (its disturbing lack of dynamism) of Swift.

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Rejected Episode Titles:

Some U.N. Charter Thing
Always One Step Ahead
C++++
C++ Without the C
Crazy Amounts of Duplication
Raised the Collective IQ of Programmers
Definitely Kind of a Puff Piece
We Have This Myopia
Maybe He’s the New Rumsfeld
The Weirdly-Named BACON Conference
There’s No Message Sending in Swift!
That’s Where the “V” in V-Table Comes From
The Entire Compile-Time Business
It’s Delayed Binding
Everything Was Slow in the 10.0 Days
It Makes Software Fragile
He’s Got His Own Reality Distortion Field
You’re in a World of Pain
I’m on Team Alan Kay
They’re Not Show-Stoppers
A Horrible Temptation for Most People
Jamming Stuff into a Giant, Static Codebase
C4 All Over Again
It Already Is Too Late
We Don’t Get a Vote

Edge Cases 98: When the Bubble Bursts

Thu, 24 Jul 2014 00:00:00 -0700

Andrew Pontious talks with Wolf Rentzsch about the current tech bubble: is it one? Is it web or mobile, or both? Is it like the 90s dot-com bubble? Plus: the tech industry in San Francisco, and Andrew’s tips for surviving a bust.

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Rejected Episode Titles:

“Are You a Prepper?” “Like, Dr Prepper?”
A Red Shed in Wisconsin
I’m Going to Read from Wikipedia Again
I Am Not An Economist
I Looked at Their Little Graph
All Feeding on the Trough of Dot-Com Companies
The Next Facebook of Whatever
When the Investors Say “Enough”
Don’t Worry, I Have a Lot of Comments
Be Conservative
Not Fruit Roll-Ups, Just Roll-Ups
Buy a Compound Bow and Learn to Enjoy the Taste of Venison
You May Want a Plan B
Do It Now, DO IT NOW
The Biggest Initial Hurtle Is Mental
While the Pond Got Smaller, a Lot of Fish Left
My Phone Kept on Ringing
Supplying Hardware for the War
Doing the Matrix-Style Brain Upload
Each Time, He’s Saying, Nah, Nah
I’ll Wait for the Economy to Tank, and Then I’ll Be in Great Shape
That’s Where the Money Is
Right Now, We’re Sitting Pretty

Edge Cases 97: The Dynamics and Politics of Code Reuse

Thu, 17 Jul 2014 00:00:00 -0700

Wolf Rentzsch talks to Andrew Pontious about the dynamics and politics of code reuse: from the complexities of the simple case to the control issues of relying on Apple’s code.

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Rejected Episode Titles:

Complexity and Control
It’s All Methods Nowadays
Pretty Much on the Same Side Here
Right There You Have a Bunch of Problems
As Hard-Core as Java
No No, I’m a Good Programmer
We’re Just Banging Rocks Together
That Cost Is Complexity
There Are No Solutions, Only Tradeoffs
Another Way Software Can Break
A Disjoint Narrative
Use the Glorious Internet
Pick a Side in the License Wars
All We Have Is Symbols
Controlled by Corporate Interests
I Blame Rene Ritchie
Code Is Liability
Behind the Music About NSProgress

Edge Cases 96: “Refactoring Sucks!”

Sat, 12 Jul 2014 00:00:00 -0700

Andrew Pontious talks to Wolf Rentzsch about refactoring, including Martin Fowler’s influential book, what ASTs are and aren’t, and Andrew’s time working on the refactoring feature in Xcode.

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Rejected Episode Titles:

Foiled by Tweets Once Again
I Could Listen to You All Night
Refactoring Is Often Abused
Not Like Jony Ive Design
I Wouldn’t Say Hostile
A More Computer Science-y Way of Describing It
I Criticize a Lot of Things
How Do I Square That?
Wikipedia Is Fairly Mushy
Always Been an AST Guy
If You Have This, You Should Probably Go See Your Doctor
That’s a Balancing Act
There’s a Node for That
Did a Whole CSI Thing
Rewind and Enhance
That’s a Great Theory
Stymied by the Language
I’ve Just Been Programming Too Long
Every Little Bloody Transformation
I Don’t Know What Kind of Magic They Do
Powerful to Give Names to Things

Edge Cases 95: Conflict-free Replicated Data Types

Sat, 05 Jul 2014 00:00:00 -0700

Wolf Rentzsch talks to Andrew Pontious Conflict-free Replicated Datatypes (CRDTs), an exciting new suite of simple data types that are explicitly designed for distributed data storage. Also: CAP theorem, eventual consistency, and Indiana Jones.

Links:

Rejected Episode Titles:

In Your Little Process
You Can Grab Pixels
I Wanted to Make This Episode Better
No Promises
I Like to Go Historical
The Terminology Is a Little Weird
Generic, Academic Term
Now They Can’t Talk
Still Alive and Walking Among Us
There’s No God Mode
Each Node Knows What It Knows
It’s a Jargon, and It’s Not Our Jargon
A Big Gossip Circle
Consensus Is a Bottleneck
A Queue of Coffee Cups
It Changed How I Did Laundry
Consensus Is Not Free
Our First Lady Gaga Reference in All of Edge Cases
‘et al’, If I Want to Be All Academic
This Is Kind of Messed Up and Confusing
A Survey of the Field

Edge Cases 94: What's New in Xcode 6

Sat, 21 Jun 2014 00:00:00 -0700

Andrew Pontious takes advantage of Apple’s looser WWDC NDA to talk with Wolf Rentzsch about some of the new features in the prerelease version of Xcode 6.

Links:

Rejected Episode Titles:

More Accurately: What’s New in Xcode 6 That Andrew Got to Before We Started Recording
We Could Just Talk About It
My First Xcode 6 Rant?
Spilling Over into Dev-Land
Stop Being Stupid About This
I Cheated, Because I Read Your Tweets
The First Thing I Tried, Because I’m a Bastard
Take That, Interface Builder!
Seamlessly Is Unseemly
Points of Failure That You Can’t Reach
Breakpoints Are All You Have
Crappy UI That Fits Any Size
Now They Can Pile on the Features
The Belle of the WWDC14 Ball
They Did Their Homework, They Ate Their Vegetables
I’m All for Separation of Concerns
You’re Live-Viewing Yourself
A Fan of XPC
Interface Builder Was Halfway There
If We Had Real Live Development Objects
I Give Them a Lot of Grief
A Taste of Things to Come
Heartened by the REPL
We Are Agreed: It Would Be Neat

Edge Cases 93: The Culture Didn't Change First

Sat, 14 Jun 2014 00:00:00 -0700

Wolf Rentzsch talks to Andrew Pontious about technical culture: how various technologies are associated with beliefs and their priorities. Examples include Linux, Perl, Python, the Web, and of course Apple and Swift.

Links:

Rejected Episode Titles:

You’re Playing the Long Game
“Look at Me, I’m Reading Literature!”
We’re the Fish, in the Water
I Like Your Facets
Your Name Personally Butchered by Me
I’ll Go with That, Pedant
A Framework ‘Du Jour’
They’re Quantum Microlibraries
You’re Going to Get Vtables for Everything
One Line of Swift Code
Worried About Your Icon Wiggling a Certain Way
The Uptake Will Be Pretty Rapid
Versus the Graybeards
Lack of Real Software Discipline
A Good Injection for Our Culture
Some Cocoa Guys Writing a Web Framework
Cut off in a Backwater
Apple Is Still Thinking Like an Objective-C Company
A Funny Little Tweet About It
I Don’t Think You Can Bolt It on Later
An Incoherent Language Which Has More Features That I Like

Edge Cases 92: Edge Cases Live

Tue, 03 Jun 2014 00:00:00 -0700

Wolf Rentzsch and Andrew Pontious record before a live audience at AltLabs during WWDC. Topics: avoiding Sherlocking, seriousness/elegance vs. fun/extensibility at Apple, the “tidal wave” of third-party developers (Wolf) and Swift as a half-step (Andrew).

Links:

Rejected Episode Titles:

How Many People Got Sherlocked Yesterday?
Avoid the 800 Pound Gorilla That Is Apple
Dodged the Leather Bullet
“You’re Such a Downer”
The Magpie of OS and App Development
A Wow Factor
Chase These Squirrels
Try Not to Be a Feature
Apple Doesn’t Care About Your Feature Request
And You Were a Total Noob About It
This Was Another Half-Step
Maybe It’s the Drinking
Being Creative in the Corners
Java Has Its Problems
I Don’t Know Who This Is Next to Me!
Another Halfway Towards LISP
God, the Endless Parens
Thank You for the Topical Smack-Down
I Only Visited France for the Day
He Drained the Six Colors
They Had the Elegance, and They Had the Fun
The Fuel Ratio’s Been Kind of Off
The Race to the Bottom Is Still There
They’ve Put a Little Rug in the Cage
The NuBus Episode
One IDE to Rule Them All
The Tidal Wave of Kittens
Known Malcontents
They’re Going to Try to Kill It

Edge Cases 91: Our Broken Job Interview Process

Thu, 08 May 2014 00:00:00 -0700

During Wolf’s continuing hiatus, second guest cohost Ashley Nelson-Hornstein talks with Andrew Pontious about how tech industry job interviews don’t work, and what can be done to fix them.

Links:

Rejected Episode Titles:

Entirely Disenchanted with the Process
Preaching to the Choir
Kvetching About Stuff
You’ve Changed Jobs How Many Times Now?
This Process Is Awesome!
A Ridiculous Luck-Based Dog and Pony Show
Awkwardly Type into Your Web Browser
Mobile Developers Should Interview Mobile Developers
The Only Time They Use Computer Science
It Could Be Anything
I Hope the Computer Science Topics I Studied the Night Before Are Brought up Today
Your Brain Wants to Crawl out of Your Head
We’re Not Web Developers
That Is Something That Should Just Never Happen
You’re Not Whiteboarding Objective-C
The Technical Deep Dive
Look at Its Review Score, Hire Me!
A Plethora of Options
A Hundred and Eighty Degrees of Thumb
I’ve Never Asked for Positive Feedback
Dating vs Marriage
You Did Get Me, Congratulations
Interviews Still Pretty Much Suck
Looking at Candidates That Are Like Themselves

Edge Cases 90: Closed Captions and Subtitles

Sun, 27 Apr 2014 00:00:00 -0700

As Wolf takes an extended hiatus, first guest cohost Justin Kaufman talks with Andrew Pontious about how you use text and audio to describe video, such as closed captions, subtitles, and descriptive audio. Also: many contributions by Andrew’s cat, sorry!

Links:

Rejected Episode Titles:

My Cat Has Decided to Add Something to Say
I Don’t Know Anything About Television
We Love Rants on Edge Cases
Abstraction Is Fantastic
Civil Servants on a Spaceship
As an English Monoglot
You Had to Have a Decoder Box
There’s a Technical Meaning Here and We’re Kind of Violating It
This Whole Long History That I’m Going to Omit
Television Decoder Circuitry Act of 1990
Completely Illegible on Anything Smaller Than 13 Inches
Never Meant to Be Crystal Clear
How Is Netflix Covered by This?
There Have Been Some Scuffles
21st Century Communications and Video Act
Nobody Wants to Make Bold Statements
Crazy Degree of Customization
It Just Goes On and On and On
This All Works with AirPlay
You Can Throw That Up to Your TV
You Have to Be Careful with HTML5
It’s All Timed Media
This Text, at This Time, in This Location
Nobody Completely Agrees on the Right Way to Do It
It’s Really an Art
Instead of Trying to Jam Your Headphones Ever Deeper into Your Ear

Edge Cases 89: Multipeer Connectivity Is a Terrible Name

Sat, 19 Apr 2014 00:00:00 -0700

Wolf Rentzsch talks to Andrew Pontious about Apple’s new promising but troubled Multipeer Connectivity framework and his new app that takes advantage of it: Rumor Monger.

Links:

Rejected Episode Titles:

Well, That’s a Mouthful
Everybody Does It the Same Way for the Same Reasons
There Are No Ruby Tuples
♫ “Everything You Can Do I Can Do Better” ♫
Mushrooms After a Rainstorm
Massively Powerful Transceivers in Our Pocket
I Don’t Know Exactly How All This Stuff Works
In the Best Edge Cases Tradition
Not as Good as “Wolf Rentzsch”
We Tend to Make Fun of the Suits
You’re Going to Release Code, Aren’t You?
Viruses Jumping from Person to Person
Have You Mentioned What It Actually Does Yet?
“Now, Ten Years Later…”
The Fog of Time Is Becoming Less Dense
People Are Terrible, That’s Really the Root Problem
Harry Couldn’t Kill It
Fear Will Keep the Systems in Line
Those Were a Lot of Rowdy People
My Implementation Is Considerably Dumber
I Haven’t Moved to France Yet
Xcode Just Loves to Crash When You Do That
This Is Me Getting Pissed Off Enough at UITextView
You Have Advertisers and You Have Browsers
I Had to Rip My Hair Out
Unless You Want to Endure a Lot of Pain

Edge Cases 88: Tuple for Your Thoughts?

Sat, 12 Apr 2014 00:00:00 -0700

Andrew Pontious talks with Wolf Rentzsch about the simplest of things, the tuple: what it is, how it is used in other languages (specifically Python), and how, in an alternate universe, it could bring some sanity to Cocoa error handling.

Links:

Rejected Episode Titles:

Oh, That’s Horrible
Our Day-ta/Dahh-ta Argument
His Love Is Unconditional
You Lose Some Cred Points Right There
The Absolute Wrong Way to Do It
A Bunch of Bother
I Forgot the ‘F’
Wanna Grab Some Lunch?
A Series of Fixed Objects
Wolf, You Love It When I Read Code
A Lot of Stuff to Unpack
The Idiocy of Using URLs as File References
“This Method Is Spelled Correctly”
Who Reads Documentation?
Singles, Doubles, Triples
Incredibly Verbose
Better Living with Tuples
A Textbook Case of Not Using Tuples
They Don’t Really Work Together Very Well
There’s an Error, but I Don’t Care
Remember When We Used to Pass Structs Around?
C++ Is the Kitchen Sink of Languages
Maybe I Was Young and Naive
I’m Sure Somebody’s Done That
Kind of a Tourist Trip
You Should Feel in Good Company
Not Like an Animal

Edge Cases 87: JavaScript Plus Square Brackets

Fri, 04 Apr 2014 00:00:00 -0700

Wolf Rentzsch talks to guest cohost Gus Mueller about Cocoa Script. An evolution of his earlier effort, JSTalk, Cocoa Script is Gus’s sane Mac app scripting alternative to AppleScript, based on JavaScript with Objective-C-style extensions.

Links:

Rejected Episode Titles:

This Famous List of Topics
The End of the Series, the End of the World
A Meaningless Three-Digit Number
Felt the Pain of AppleScript
Steal from Me!
You Can See My Trials
Not Very Good at Branches
Really Strong Embeddable Story
Love Note to Objective-C
A Little Bit of Syntax Highlighting
Stand on the Shoulders of Giants
Mocha Is a Bridge
CocoaScript Would Be a Better Name
You Can’t Be Blamed
Very Excited When That First Came Out
And Then Disappointed
As I Was Walking the Codebase
Because of the C Influence
A Developer Scripting Language
Not Long for This World
All the Way to the NeXT Years
It Was Pretty Raw
Everyone Sending Messages to Each Other
Exactly the Sort of Thing That Apple Doesn’t Want to Happen
I Generally Hate People
That’s Why We Program

Edge Cases 86: Andrew’s Blogroll in the Post-Blog Era

Sat, 29 Mar 2014 00:00:00 -0700

Andrew Pontious talks with Wolf Rentzsch about the developer blogs he follows via RSS: the ones that have died/gone fallow/transformed, the ones he’s added recently, and the ones that seem to be trying to replicate Apple’s tutorials and documentation.

Links:

Rejected Episode Titles:

I Do Follow Your Blog!
The Prolific Brent Simmons
I Think So, but I’m Probably Wrong
I Want to Subscribe to a Person
A Fan of Compartmentalization
What the Heck, It’s What I Do
I’m Not Going to Spell “Tumblr”
Quote-Unquote “Tired”
There’s Reader and Then There’s Reeder
The Brain Cells That They’re Due
Read-It-Never
As You Might Imagine, He Gets Frustrated
He’s Pretty Mental!
Frenemy of the Show
Way to Prepare for the Episode, Man!
Not Holy, Not Roman, Not an Empire
A Bit of an Odd Duck
I Thought I Was the Guy Who Knew Everything
There’s a Hole to Be Filled
Fifteen Ways to Blah-Blah-Blah
Piled up a Few Dinosaurs
You’d Make a Good King
The Last Rat off a Sinking Ship

Edge Cases 85: A Fan of Ravioli Code

Sun, 23 Mar 2014 00:00:00 -0700

Wolf Rentzsch talks to Andrew Pontious about programming pasta: disorganized “spaghetti” code, multi-layered “lasagna” code, and conceptually-separated “ravioli” code (his favorite). Bonus: new GitHub project!

Links:

Rejected Episode Titles:

Pasta Programming
A Bevy of Related Pastas
Lasagna Code
Shell Pasta Code
Often Known as Onion Code
Kind of Like a Jenga Stack
Let’s See How Many Metaphors We Can Throw In
Spaghetti with Meatballs
So Maybe Like Swedish Meatballs?
If Anybody’s Still Listening
Macaroni Code
Ravioli Code
Do Their Ravioli Thing
It’s Meatballs Through and Through
Kitchen Countertop Programming
The Double-Curly Technique
Bulkheads in the Titanic
The Rachel Ray Episode
Changes Rippled Through Just Like a Dream
Lost in a Sea of Ravioli
I Had Fundamental Misunderstandings
A Terrible, Terrible, Terrible Name
Dependency Injection…Duh Duh Duh!
A Twenty-Five Dollar Term for a Five-Cent Concept
Ball of Mud View Controller
We All Know About Asparagus

Edge Cases 84: A Couple of Maxims, a Couple of Aphorisms

Sat, 15 Mar 2014 00:00:00 -0700

Andrew Pontious talks to Wolf Rentzsch about the three maxims he gleaned from Evan Doll’s interview on the Debug podcast: code is a liability, ship the right bugs, and (paraphrased) don’t impose unneeded project methodologies.

Links:

Rejected Episode Titles:

The Collected Wisdom of Evan Doll
I’m Sure You Have Questions
Division Used to Be Really Expensive
God, Why Would I Do That?
Code Is a Liability
Ship the Right Bugs
The Pinnacle of Cutting Edge Thinking
I’m Hanging Up Right Now
Code Leads to Bugs, Bugs Lead to Suffering
Person or Robot or Whatever
How Do You Freeze-Dry an Object?
And of Course, as a Graybeard Myself…
Up to and Including the Event Loop
Not in Anger, No
Single-Handedly Trying to Bring Blogs Back
No, I’m Kidding, Don’t Do That at Home
Not All the Sample Code Is Written by Interns
Really Hard-Asses About Punting Bugs
I May Be Butchering This
Kill Your Darlings
A Very Kind of Adult Thing
It’s Hard to Do, but It’s a Good Idea
I’m Successful, so Here’s What I Had for Breakfast, and You Should Have That for Breakfast
We Have These Binary Bits
Hence the Name of This Bloody Podcast
What Are You Doing to Your Entities!

Edge Cases 83: Floating Point Numbers Are a Leaky Abstraction

Sat, 08 Mar 2014 00:00:00 -0800

Wolf Rentzsch talks to Andrew Pontious about floating point numbers: how they work, why they’re weird, and when you definitely shouldn’t use them (hint: mo money mo problems).

Links:

Rejected Episode Titles:

You Bet Your Asset Catalog!
All Models Are Wrong, Some Models Are Useful
Imagine You’re on the Beach at a Resort
Now, Imagine That You Go All Godzilla
(Not the Spreadsheet)
It’s Not a Trick Question, Although Maybe It Is
This Was Science and This Was Truth
Numbers! I Know This!
Not Your First Floating Point Rodeo
If We Went to School, We Probably Would Know That
You’re in This Different World
Because You’re a Graybeard
You’ve Exhausted It
There Are No Solutions, There Are Only Tradeoffs
That’s a Lot of Zeroes to Say
“Aren’t You a Compression Buff?” “It’s More of a Hobby”
This Could Be a Very Long Episode
Gradual Underflow
You’ve Suffered Accuracy Loss
Numerically Unsophisticated Programmers
This False Sense of Security
Then the Wave Comes in and Sweeps You in the Ocean
“No One Really Cares About This Stuff” “Except You” “Even I…My Eyes Glaze Over”
A Bunch of Decisions That Humans Had to Make
Genetically Diverse
We Can Pretty Much Thank Intel for It
We’re Mentioning DEC Again
The First Thing Some Joker Would Do
Don’t Use Floating Point Numbers for Money
Avoid Floating Point If You Can

Edge Cases 82: Asset Catalogs

Sat, 01 Mar 2014 00:00:00 -0800

Andrew Pontious stumps Wolf Rentzsch not once, but repeatedly, by talking about asset catalogs, new in Xcode 5. But in turn he is stumped attempting to backport them to earlier OSes.

Links:

Rejected Episode Titles:

“Is That the Xcode Thing?” “Yeah”
A Tale of Woe
Competing with Yourself
We’re Both Joneses in This Analogy
A Developer Tool Component and a Runtime Component
They Didn’t Like Different Things
IOS Kind of Screwed with That
We Don’t Have a Mike Ash Post About It Yet
Never Been Really Stellar at Launch Times
You Have to Do It in Code
I Remember It like It Was Yesterday
Designed by Someone Who Hates Xcode
People Bugging Apple for Some Time
Why Do We Have Groups and Files That Are Different in the Project Than They Are on Disk?
Entropy Creeps In
Chip in the Armor? Chink in the Armor?
And the Answer’s No, but OK, We’re Going to Talk About It Anyway
It’s All in the File System
Script Build Phrase
Might as Well Bash Your Head In
I Feel Like I’m Not Living Up to My Rep
They’re Just Incomprehensible Text Files
A Pretty Big Stickler for Build Warnings
What’s Not to Like?
Bad Hash Collision in My Brain
This Perfectly Good Plist Format
The User Interface Actually Kind of Baffles Me
This Is Something That Was Solved
I’m All for JSON
Not Even Webby
Good Job Stumping Me

Edge Cases 81: The Only Cool Thing About PDF

Sun, 23 Feb 2014 00:00:00 -0800

Wolf Rentzsch tries to keep up with Andrew “The Joneses” Pontious and introduces JRPDFLabel, his new…innovative project that allow you to use custom fonts in Interface Builder without having to bundle the entire font with your Mac app.

Links:

Rejected Episode Titles:

A Lot of Extra Work for Something Not Very Interesting
Turtles All the Way Down
You Still Have Plenty of Surprises Left for Me, Wolf
Not as Cool as Dragging Entities into a Window
Really? The Kids Are Calling It That?
We Call Them Sorcerers
Reinventing NSControl
I Wouldn’t Call It a Monstrosity
“Can I Call It a Monstrosity?” “Sure!”
I Had Not Been Finished Expressing the Horror
This Is High-Quality Stuff
I’m Not a Lawyer, but That’s My Understanding
Oh, You’re Doomed, All Right
The Equivalent of Flash Cookies in Your PDF
It’s Not That Bad
The Quote-Unquote Simple Thing That I Really Wanted to Do
Andy’s Being a Great Guy
Your First Diabolical Idea?
Ohhh, I Know Where This Is Going…Oh God…
It’s Kind of Like Journaling
Did You Open It in Acrobat?
Or God Help You, Your Bots
Already Used to a Certain Amount of Pain
It’s Kinda Sketch
Including Yourself, but Now You’re Invisible
You Sound Pretty Self-Satisfied About That
You, Apparently, Want to Mess with It
Probably Not Very High Quality…At Least It’s Free
Did You Use “Wolf Dingbats”?
You Should Ignore All of This
Like a Big Stupid Head
Everyone Already Has Comic Sans
iOS Also Has a Studly PDF Rendering
I Have Too Much to Live For
Thanks for Showing Us Your Yaks, Wolf

Edge Cases 80: Xcode Templates

Sat, 15 Feb 2014 00:00:00 -0800

Andrew Pontious, with guest cohost Josh Johnson, talks about Xcode project and file templates.

Links:

Rejected Episode Titles:

Pulling a Siracusa
A Topic List a Mile Long
I Hid Our Cats Before I Started
I Guess It’s Not a Fair Question
A Whole Bunch of Other Crap in There
Only Localized in Japanese
A Regular Old Plist
Hey Everybody, Gather Round
An Odd Little Duckling
‘Trunder’ or Possibly ‘Thunder’
Unlike Objective-C Itself
I Bet They Got Mocked Quite a Bit for That
So You No Longer Have That Stupid Organization Name
It Makes It Less Flexible
The Great Disaster That Was the Switch Between Xcode 3 and Xcode 4
I’m Glad That This Is the Topic

Edge Cases 79: ClickToFlash: Behind the Music

Sat, 08 Feb 2014 00:00:00 -0800

Wolf Rentzsch talks to Andrew Pontious about how he unexpectedly came to lead the popular and award-winning Safari plugin ClickToFlash, and how, after a wild ride, the project both ended and continued on.

Links:

Rejected Episode Titles:

Cofounder of Panic, Which Everyone Loves
When the URLs Burned up Your One-Forty
Flash Cookies Turn out to Be Really Strong Sauce
An Infinite Cookie
“You Really Love YouTube.” “I Wouldn’t Have Phrased It That Way…”
Gathering up Their Patches
GitHub Is Where Pull Requests Happen
“Are You Sure It Wasn’t You?” “I Am Batman!”
A Shadow Vigilante
One Point Oh Plus Rentzsch
At This Point You Should Cue the Foreboding Music
Our Lifelong Hate of Installer Technology
A Downward Spiral of Drugs and Alcohol
Unfortunately I Wasn’t That Evil Back Then
Just to Alleviate My Guilt
Settings, Advanced Settings, Privacy, Content Settings, Click to Play
I Basically Choked on This Pull Request
He Was Already off to the Races
Branded as a Flash Hater
I Had a Ton of Fun Doing It, and I’m Glad It’s Over
You Don’t Like Flash, Do You Like Green Lantern?

Edge Cases 78: Indexing with Clang

Sun, 02 Feb 2014 00:00:00 -0800

Andrew Pontious describes to Wolf Rentzsch his efforts to use libclang to index his Xcode projects, using his new (and barely functional) Chime framework.

Links:

Rejected Episode Titles:

I Had Not Broken Free of the Chain
Clang’s a Big Topic
You Could Route Around Apple
“Provides a Public Inferface”
CFRelease All Over Again
In Edge Cases and Perhaps Wolf Fashion
It Appears to Do Nothing
Objective-C: It’s Not Magical
Slow Enumeration
Enumerate, Blobbity Blobbity Blah
Kinda Streamy
There’s a Whole Bunch of Different Buckets
I Have Nothing Concrete to Tell You
It Can’t Be All That Fuzzy
Xcode Doesn’t Just Fall Over
It’s an Extremely Difficult Problem
Science Also Has This Issue
You Really Like Hearing from Losers
A Horrible Engineering Challenge
Very Excited About Your Little Chime Project

Edge Cases 77: Prototype-Based Programming

Sat, 25 Jan 2014 00:00:00 -0800

Wolf Rentzsch talks to Andrew Pontious about his other favorite thing, prototype-based programming, and examples of it such as Self, NewtonScript, Io, and, yes, JavaScript. Plus: the dunder is back!

Links:

Rejected Episode Titles:

The Other Favorite Thing
You Always Have a Screenful of Notes
I’m in a Bad Situation
I Got Hopelessly Excited
I Would Like an Instance of You
“Don’t Let Me Derail You.” “Too Late.”
Maybe That’s All the More Reason to Do That
What Is an Instance of a Class?
You Need This Thing That’s Above Classes
It Is Not Turtles All the Way Down
Draw the Line at That Frivolity Right There
Much More Sensible in C Land
Have You Done This? Of Course You Have!
That Solves the Philosophical Problem
Better in Every Conceivable Way
Emphasize the ‘Class’ in ‘Classical’
Objects As Glorified Dictionaries
Walk Up to the NSWindow Instance
I Don’t Think There’s Any Need for Classes
A Slave to the Process Model
There’s No Life After Death
It’s That Xcode Blueprint Thing Again
When You Reboot the Universe Every Time
Assembling a Bicycle Instead of Writing the Assembly Manual for a Bicycle
Classes Have a Very High Cognitive Load
Where View Controllers Kind of Rule the Day
God, You Don’t Want to Have to Write Another Class!
If You Color Within the Lines
This Intellectual Sludge
The Great JavaScript Engine Wars
Self Didn’t Catch the World on Fire
More Pythonic Type of Stuff
That Seed of Discontent

Edge Cases 76: Let's Try iCloud Syncing

Sat, 18 Jan 2014 00:00:00 -0800

Andrew Pontious talks with Wolf Rentzsch about the cool aspects and the frustrating aspects of Apple’s iCloud document syncing. Plus: Wolf disses HyperCard!

Links:

Rejected Episode Titles:

He Went On and On About Interface Builder
I Think I Was Actually Wrong
I Coulda Told ’Em
It Sounds Like Wolf Catnip…Wolfnip?
Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom
You Gotta Pay for Both, Boo Hoo
It Could Actually Be Foogleblarghyblargh
Xcode Does That for You, Which Is a Little Scary
The End of the Cool Stuff
Exercise for the Reader
I Love Using the Word Edge Cases
“My God, Apple, Stop Letting Us Do Our Own Thing!”
Closer to the Truth Than I’d Like to Admit
Unicode is Impossible, This Crazy Beast
Always Going to Be a Race Condition
We’ll Let It Be Impossible
Can Wrappers Be Called Leaky?
A Lot of Stuff Can Happen in a Second
You Can’t Leave Files Behind
A Total Hot Mess
Computer Science–Hard Stuff to Do
Ending on a Stupid Joke, We Can Do That

Edge Cases 75: A Few of My Favorite Things

Sat, 11 Jan 2014 00:00:00 -0800

Wolf Rentzsch talks to Andrew Pontious about two of his favorite things, live development objects and Code Bubbles. Plus: revisiting Microsoft’s Singularity.

Links:

Rejected Episode Titles:

The Magic’s Gone
Maybe I’m Just a Big Blabbermouth
Siracusa Being the Madman That He Is
Keep in Mind This Is Not THE Singularity
A Gemini Thing Going On
Freeze-Dried Objects
These Troublesome Laws of Physics
For a Certain Value of “We”
Feels More Like Clay
Code Being Flung over the Wire
The Pony Episode
A Truly Dynamic Language Yearning to Breathe Free
Every Other Minute Blows Your Mind
The Seed of Discontent
A Guy Who Loves Lots of Windows on His Screen
What Was That About Being Positive?
Writing Code, Writing Code, Writing Code CHUNK Time to Move Over to Debug!
The Best Reason to Install Java on Your Mac
Try a Little Slice of the Future Here

Edge Cases 74: Accessibility

Sat, 28 Dec 2013 00:00:00 -0800

Andrew Pontious along with Wolf Rentzsch delves into Apple’s accessibility APIs for iOS.

Links:

Rejected Episode Titles:

“I Like the Way You Think.” “Really? Nobody Else Seems To.”
Don’t Be Stupid!
What the Darn Thing’s Gonna Do
Don’t Smush Together Things
Instances of Deep Polish
A Maintenance Smell
I Rarely Prove Myself Too Much of a Pessimist
Which Was Not Very Well-Spent Time
You Are the Walter White of Cocoa
Still Geometry-Based
A Muscle-Memory Thing
It’s Not Like There’s a Carbon
On the Mac, It’s So Much Worse
Sort of Complaint-Minded

Edge Cases 73: Sequential Consistency

Sun, 22 Dec 2013 00:00:00 -0800

Wolf Rentzsch talks to Andrew Pontious about sequential consistency and memory models by dressing up Andrew as a Processor and himself as Main Memory. Special involuntary cameo by Daniel Jalkut the Cache (not really).

Links:

Rejected Episode Titles:

A Custom Mispronunciation of Your Name
Right There, You Already Have Your First Problem
We’re Going to Do a Little Role Playing
As Close to Shakespeare as We Get Here at Edge Cases
Andrew, You’re Really Fast, Everyone Says That
La-Di-La, Check Your Watch, Check Twitter
To Continue the Inappropriate Anthromorphization
Jalkut the Cache
Actually One of the Worst Things You Can Do
This Only Buys You So Much
Like a Tree Falling in the Forest
You Should Take All This with a Grain of Salt
You’re a Fool to Listen to Us
Storing Is Communication
We Want to Throw Some Money at the Problem
I’m Already Cheap
Have You Ever Had the Pleasure of Debugging Optimized Code?
Where All the Jalkuts Get to Talk to Each Other
We Don’t Want to Cut Java Any Slack
Go into Lawyer Mode
You’re in Undefined Land, No One Can Help You Anyway
Surprisingly Strongly Consistent
That’s When the Bit Gets Set
That’s How Awesome We Are

Edge Cases 72: It's Not Just Code, It's Unicode

Fri, 13 Dec 2013 00:00:00 -0800

Andrew Pontious talks hexy to Wolf Rentzsch by going on at length about Unicode: its design, its planes (astral and otherwise), and its UTF-16 and UTF-8 encodings. Plus: backup followup.

Links:

Rejected Episode Titles:

I Have My Own Misgivings About This Topic
Not Only Because It Destroyed Your System
I Could Never Find the Emotional Strength
We Warned You About This, Nicholas
Don’t Quote Me on That
Backup Itself Is Such a Terrible Topic
In the Corner There, Sulking
He’s Taken the Arrows in the Back for Us
Or Umlaut, If You’re German
Automate Ourselves Away
A Bit of a Scope Increase
Talk Hexy to Me
I Don’t Even Know What’s in There
How Wikipedia Thinks That Works
It Cracks Me Up When You Read Binary
It’s a Magic Cookie
Two Thingies to Represent One Character
If You Want to Wake the Beast
Given Unicode, That Way Lies Madness
Dammit, Stop This Idiocy

Edge Cases 71: Libraries vs Collaborating Objects

Sun, 08 Dec 2013 00:00:00 -0800

Wolf Rentzsch talks to Andrew Pontious about software interface design, using jQuery’s Ajax functionality as an example of a “library” API style and NSURLConnection as an example of a “collaborating objects” API style. Plus: AFNetworking, and NSURLSession.

Links:

Rejected Episode Titles:

This Is the NURLConnection One
Involuntary Followup
Everybody Should Use Time Machine
Pluck the Remaining Files
Shows How Much I Know About the Medical Profession
The Elevator Pitch for JQuery
Suspend Your Disgust
A Bit of Knowledge Wikipedia Doesn’t Know
That’s a Little JQuery Joke for You Two People in the Audience
The Worse Case Scenario
“Let Us Now Talk About NSURLConnection” “…Must We?”
The Detritus Left on Shore After That Storm
Designed Literally a Decade Ago
A C Function Pointer, Which Nobody Likes
Every Single Method Is Optional
Not That I Recommend Diving In
Google+ Is Still a Present Danger
Talking Trash About AFNetworking
A Big Ball of MUD
I Will Take a String, Because F U NSURL
What Really Helps Is Diagramming
Don’t Use UML
My Good Friend NSCalendarDate
It’s Like You Don’t Know Me at All

Edge Cases 70: Android Is Like Moving to France

Sat, 23 Nov 2013 00:00:00 -0800

Andrew Pontious talks with Wolf Rentzsch about taking the very first steps to try to develop for Android, including why he’s thinking about it, why companies like Eclipse even if he doesn’t, and why he had to turn to Stack Overflow almost immediately.

Links:

Rejected Episode Titles:

Back to the Mac, and Not in a Good Way
Apple Will Keep Slipping Further and Further Behind
Apple’s Kind of Letting Us Down
Less Reason for Us to Stay…Monogamous?
Unsettling Connections
I’m Not Going to Make That Promise
Eclipse Makes Me Shudder
You Actually Took One for the Team
Something to Get Me Over That Hump
I Can’t Get a Damn Thing to Work
That Really Stumps a Lot of People
It’s Still Intensely Stupid, but At Least That Helps
Maybe for My Third or Fourth Episode about Learning Android
A Software Tooling Issue
Speaking As Mr. Mogenerator
It’s a Little Weird
At Least Three Problems That Stopped Me Dead
Wait a Minute, I Need That
I’d Better Go Off to the Internet
Right Now I’m Just Going to Role With It
Which Is Also a Fairly Horrible Name for Something
Very Non-Apple-y Way to Do Things
Giving Up on the Mac Look and Feel…Forever
I’ll Let You Talk in a Minute
WebOS Will Spoil You
All My Normal Friends Seem to Now Have Androids

Edge Cases 69: The Time Machine Worst-Case Scenario

Sat, 16 Nov 2013 00:00:00 -0800

Wolf Rentzsch talks to Andrew Pontious about backup. Topics include Time Machine, the sadness of Time Capsule, SuperDuper, clonedrive (Wolf’s own software), CrashPlan, Backblaze, and Arq.

Links:

Rejected Episode Titles:

You Have Secret Followup?
Hungry for a Big, Empty Hard Drive
It Was Lying to Me
Time Capsule Is Such a Sad Story
It Could Be Pure Apple
Everyone Needs a Wifi Router
If They’re Normals, What Are We?
Eventually, Something Goes Wrong, All the Time
Don’t Feel Like You Actually Have to Read It
Whatever Cat That Was
Stop the World for Me
It Has the Magic Pocket Watch
Enough Quirks and Failure Scenarios
Don’t Put Your Eggs in the Time Capsule Basket
RAID Is Not a Backup
Past Me Had a Stroke or Something
The Least Reliable Part of Your System
Cocoa Copy Cloner
I’m Amazed It Works
All Backup Machismo
Randomly Eating Its Backups
It Wouldn’t Be an Edge Cases Episode If I Didn’t Write Some Code
It Looks Like a Toaster
Not What Dropbox Is For
I Feel Kind of Bad for Normals
They’re Not Doing It, and They’re Not Going to Do It
If We Mention His Name Three Times, Will He Appear?

Edge Cases 68: Improve Your App's Performance with This One Weird Tip

Sat, 09 Nov 2013 00:00:00 -0800

Andrew Pontious talks with Wolf Rentzsch about performance, including the difference ways to define performance improvements, techniques Andrew himself has used, and tips from Apple’s WWDC sessions. Plus: bcrypt is soooo 2008.

Links:

Rejected Episode Titles:

My Neopet Dog Is Not Eating My Digital Homework
“Ass-Crypt?”
Sequential Memory-Hard
The Anti-Performance Thing
bcrypt Is Old and Busted
Talking out of My “S”, as It Were
If You Get to Ten I Think You Get Some Steak Knives
All the Sessions Tend to Be a Blur
Another Head Fake, I See
A Nice Little Sneaky Way to Do It
That Was Really Unfortunate
You’re Saying “Edge Cases” a Lot During This Episode
A Fairly Blunt Instrument, Quote Unquote
Maybe I’m a Hypocrite
It Seems to Be Fairly Badly Named
I Suspect It’s Not Magic
Money That You Pay For

Edge Cases 67: Fillers and Spillers

Fri, 01 Nov 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Wolf Rentzsch talks to Andrew Pontious about his Çingleton 3 presentation, “Fillers and Spillers”: his terms for those who advance human progress (such as scientist, engineers, and artists) and those who propagate those advancements to everyone else.

Links:

Rejected Episode Titles:

Not a Method Dispatch to Be Found
All of Humanity’s Progress Is Based on Technology
Not Fighting over Animal Carcasses
A Spectrum of Respect
Crusty Graybeard Scientists
Apple Has, at Times, Lost Sight of Its Fillers
This Brings Us to Section 3.3.1
Thou Shalt Not Use Flash
The Schillers
A Fiduciary Duty
I’m Just Describing the Players
Happy in My Own Little World of Technology
I’m All for Setting More Fires

Edge Cases 66: The Language of Cross-Platform Development

Sat, 26 Oct 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Andrew Pontious talks with Wolf Rentzsch about the challenges of cross-platform development, including Mac vs. Windows, OS X vs. iOS, and iOS 6 vs. iOS 7.

Links:

Rejected Episode Titles:

This Fine, Fine Show of Ours
A Bit of a Kerfuffle
Not a Binary-Type Thing
And Don’t Say Javascript
I Probably Know Too Much About It
LISP Has Always Been Around, LISP Is Eternal
Then You’re Setting Yourself Up for Trouble
I’m Not Sure Apple Did Us Any Favors
You Get a Lot of Disrespect
Apple Was Big-Tent Back Then
They Were Slow, They Were Weird-Looking
Wizards Love Windows
Like Grit in a Pool of Oil
Our Metaphors Continue to be Wonderful
I’m Not Just Saying This in the Abstract
Well, Y’know, No You Can’t
That’s Very Adult of You
Apple Loves Transition Guides
Oh My God, Don’t DO THIS!
The Web Is Its Own Platform
I’ve Always Been an Anti-Fan
Loren Is Obviously a Genius
That’s When the Real Fun Is Going to Begin
I Feel Kind of Badly for Recommending It
The Red Carpet Leads Right There

Edge Cases 65: Threads Are Interesting

Sun, 13 Oct 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Wolf Rentzsch talks to Andrew Pontious about threads, explaining what they are, giving them a robust defense, and providing hints about his sordid concurrency past. (Spoiler: GCD wins in the end.)

Links:

Rejected Episode Titles:

I Wish I Could Blame the Bourbon
I Always Strain for Analogies
It Was Totally Deterministic
The Big-Boy Operating System Concepts
From the Days of Yore
Put a Rentzsch in the Works
I Don’t Know What’s Wrong with Us
Mach Had This Thing
Pulsing Threads
Smash on the Accelerator and Then Smash on the Brakes
No One Cared at That Point
My Claim to Fame
You Can Definitely Use Them for Evil
I Don’t Know What to Call Any of This Stuff
Only in the Preemptive World
I’ll Recursively Lock It for You
The Contender for One of the Weirdest APIs Out There
Because We’re in the Harsh Land of C
Who Wants to be Mean to the Thread?
At That Point You’re in Multithreaded Land
I Seem to Remember Leaking a Lot
State in General Is the Root of All Evil
In Threads, the Early Bird Doesn’t Get the Worm
Your OS Falls Over
I Was Just Pulling My Hair Out
Cuz You’re Going to Go on the Sloooow Paaaath

Edge Cases 64: Slobbering over Xcode 5 Auto Layout

Sun, 06 Oct 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Andrew Pontious tells Wolf Rentzsch about the changes in Xcode 5, including a more iOS-like appearance, expanded SCM functionality, new unit test UI, and most importantly, a very welcome overhaul of Interface Builder’s Auto Layout support.

Links:

Rejected Episode Titles:

Studly Floating Point Performance
Everything Is Tinier
I Don’t Run Mavericks
“Hey, Guys, You’re Not iOS!”
Too Many Notes
For Xcode To Shut Up About It
Ya Don’t Get Full Credit
Which Makes Me…Happy
Unlike Every. Other. Comparison. View. In the Universe!
It Was Wrong, It Was Stupid, It Was Bad
And They Did It Anyway, Cuz they Never Listen
Someone Has Had Their Head Meet Reality
I Hope To Be Pleasantly Surprised by It
If You Have To Look at a Tooltip, Your UI Has Failed
Here’s a New Thing! It Doesn’t Do Anything
Not Held Back by the Baggage of C
The Martha Stuart of Project Editors
Lost in a Sea of White
If It’s Odd, It Should Be Me
I’ve Been Dying To Talk About It
Apple Says a Lot of Things
The Opposite of Maintainable
You Have Checked in a Bomb into Your Project
You’re Making My Heart Go Pitter-Patter
You Made a Little Phone in the Middle of My Xcode
Just Do the Whole of Xcode This Way
Putting as Much Lipstick on the Pig as He Could

Edge Cases 63: ARM Is Kind of Like Dark Matter

Sat, 28 Sep 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Wolf Rentzsch talks to Andrew Pontious about ARM64: its history, its advantages, and its surprisingly unsurprising ISA (instruction set architecture).

Links:

earthlingsoft
Acorn Computers « Wikipedia
ARM architecture « Wikipedia
Western Design Center « Wikipedia
WDC Founder « Western Design Center
Newton (platform) « Wikipedia
Larry Tesler’s corrections to Owen W. Linzmayer’s Apple Confidential
The History of The ARM Architecture: From Inception to IPO (PDF)
The ARM Diaries, Part 1: How ARM’s Business Model Works « AnandTech
ARMv8-A Architecture Reference Manual « ARM Information Center
One instruction set computer « Wikipedia
ARM Architecture Reference Manual Extracts (local path): /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Applications/Instruments.app/Contents/Frameworks/DTISAReferenceGuide.framework/Versions/A/Resources/ARMISA.pdf
IA32 ISA (local path): /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Applications/Instruments.app/Contents/Frameworks/DTISAReferenceGuide.framework/Versions/A/Resources/IA32ISA.pdf
em64t ISA (local path): /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Applications/Instruments.app/Contents/Frameworks/DTISAReferenceGuide.framework/Versions/A/Resources/em64t_ISA.pdf
Friday Q&A 2013-09-27: ARM64 and You « mikeash.com
[objc explain]: Non-pointer isa « Hamster Emporium
Inside the Machine, by Jon Stokes « No Starch Press
See MIPS Run, Second Edition, by Dominic Sweetman « Amazon.com

Rejected Episode Titles:

Kind of Unsightly for Us
A Bit of a Programming Languages Geek
More Overlapping Names Than a Dostoyevsky Novel
Was There Another Branch Called LEG?
The British Apple
Not Readily Available in My RAM Here
This Is Where Things Start Getting Confusing
I Just Don’t Believe It
Just Tack a Zero on the End
The Hobbit Simply Wasn’t Studly Enough
You Will Never Hear About the ARM 4 and ARM 5
Like Siracusa, I Am Anti-Patent
We Talk a Lot About Intel
I Would Prefer the Term Execution Architecture
It’s Very Non-RISC-y
I’m Pretty Far Gone, but Not That Far Gone
Maybe I Have To Be a Little Less Snarky
Extra Bits for Extra Goodness
It Almost Seems Naively Clean
ARM Is Everywhere
MIPS Is Kind of a Sad Story

Edge Cases 62: Primal Debugging Systems

Sun, 25 Aug 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Andrew Pontious talks with Wolf Rentzsch about debugging: the oddity of combining a programmer’s creation role with mystery solving, debugging difficulty levels, and the tools we use, including Instruments and lldb. Plus: git bisect.

Links:

Rejected Episode Titles:

It Takes a Long Time to Build a File System
There’s Nothing Wrong with Milking Your Professional Life
A Carpenter and a Private Investigator
The Pottery Barn Rule
One Group to Make the Bugs and One Group to Fix Them
They’re Not Miracle Workers
And You Say, “That Shouldn’t Be Happening”
Happy People Are All Happy in the Same Way; Unhappy People Are All Unhappy in Different Ways
Why Are Things Not Smooth?
I Was Very Much at Home in Shark
The Pre–Xcode 4 Xcode 4
Under Systems with Shitty Debuggers, Logging Is All You Have
LLDB Had No Such Luxury
A Little Bit of Dog Action in the Back
And Then I Go Back to Writing My Log Statements
All Different Little Meta-Languages
Code or GTFO
It’s Not That Customizable
My Code, Not Your Code
Some Sort of Object Model Glued to the C Runtime
Software Is Actually Surprisingly Good
At That Point, You’re Just Abusing QA
I Want to Believe
They’re Going to Knock This One Out of the Park Too
Some Issues with Showing Me My Bloody Variables
If You Structure Your Header Files Right
Caught in the Shiny Allure of Apple’s Newest Systems
By Git Standards, It’s a Dream

Edge Cases 61: A Cryptography Tourist

Sat, 17 Aug 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Wolf Rentzsch tries to scare Andrew Pontious with all the decisions you’re likely to get wrong when implementing a cryptographic system and gives some advice on how to cope. (To skip the beginning infodump, start at 7:50.)

Links:

Rejected Episode Titles:

I Don’t Know What That Is
One of the Dense Shows
I’m Butchering His Name, But I’ll Put a Link In
All the Crypto Code You’ve Ever Written Is Probably Broken
The Newish Hotness
That Has the Word “Secure” in It
Their Internal Bit Blender State
The Point Is: You Probably Wouldn’t Get This Right
I Want to Have Some HotSec
The Thrust of What This Episode is About
We’re Domain Tourists
I Don’t Want This to Devolve into the Grep Thing
The Methodology of Test and Fix
It’s Like Tech Journalism
I’m So Hipster, I Had the Blue Cover Book
My Personal Rebellious Story Against the State, Man
All Sorts of Feelings of Power There
As Much As You Can Steal a Non-Physical Item, Which Is, I Guess, a Point of Philosophy
It Took the Money Incentive
Misused by People Like Me
If You Want to Be a White Hat, You Can
Let Me Tell You, It’s Not a Friendly API Whatsoever
All Shipping Code Has Bodies Buried in There
You Should See This Build System, Man, It’s Crazy
I’m Wrong About Some of the Stuff You’ve Listened To
A Mindset That Goes Well with This Podcast
Another Joe Programmer Who’s Pissed Off

Edge Cases 60: When You're New to a Codebase

Sat, 10 Aug 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Andrew Pontious covers with Wolf Rentzsch three aspects of learning the source code of an unfamiliar project: teaching someone else your codebase, learning a new codebase yourself, and the extra steps Andrew takes.

Links:

Rejected Episode Titles:

I’ll Just Punch in the Number
This Video Link Will Probably Break
“I’m Volunteering You.” “Thanks!”
I’m Skeptical, There, as in So Many Other Things
Nobody Really Wants That, Nobody Cares
To Know vs. Be Familiar With
If You Don’t Want to Sound like the Dude
You Won’t Have Made an Internal Model
Dig the Ruts in Your Own Mind
Way to Refer to Yourself!
Our Flashback Episode
Getting Two Different Witnesses to a Crime
Special Cases Unit
Giant Unreadable Morass of Lines
It’s Like You’re Looking Inside My App, Man
This Is Definitely Breaking a Record
A Write-Only Medium
The Seatbelt Analogy
What Is All This Crap?
Then You See This Gnarled Code
I Take Copious Notes
Find Your Go-To People
Don’t Get Discouraged
Be Prepared for the Roller Coaster
You May Be the Person on Both Ends of the Stick
They’re Useful for the Times They’re Useful For, and That’s Fine
I Have a Text File, like You
My Cache-to-Hit Ratio There Is Pretty Low

Edge Cases 59: If You're a File System Geek

Sat, 03 Aug 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Wolf Rentzsch talks with Andrew Pontious about the past, present, and future of file systems, from MFS to ZFS and beyond. Plus, how Apple could advance the state of the art with SSDs.

Links:

Rejected Episode Titles:

You Being the Noob to the Mac
Really Cool in a Lot of Different Ways
Now That Apple Owns the World
Probably Not in a Good Way, but Still Interesting
Eat Up My Machine Forever
Where_have_all_my_files_gone?
You Just Get the Candy, You Don’t Get the Wrapper
ACLs Still Kinda Confuse Me, I Still Pretty Much Stay Away from Them
You Can Kind of Think of It as a Cache, but It’s Better Than That
I Don’t Know How You’re Coping with This
“Even That Strategy’s Untenable.” “Oh Well.”
You Say What You’re Going to Do, and Then You Do It
When Did Avi Leave?
More Than One Andrew Out There
Which Made it Very Database-y
The Prelude to Spotlight
The Zettabyte File System
Kentucky Fried Chicken Does Not Have Their Own File System
You Don’t Have Any Dirt?
Apple Lawyers Doing Their Due Diligence
ZFS on the Mac Is in a Very Sad State
It Focuses on Data Corruption
The All-Time Favorite, Cosmic Rays
Things That Were Previously Assumed Studly
He Just Screams at the Server
Just Roll with Me
Kind of a Catch-22 Type Thing
The More Memory You Can Throw at It, the Better
The Oracle Taint on It
Grow into the ZFS Shoes
On the Mac, We’re Just Lost, and We Have No Hope
We Don’t Know How They Work
Apple Can Lead the Charge There
They Control the Hardware, They Control the Software
Only File System Geeks Like Me Would Actually Care

Edge Cases 58: Testing Whether You Believe in Fairies

Sat, 27 Jul 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Andrew Pontious talks about interviewing for a job as a developer with Wolf Rentzsch: linked lists, trick questions, big-O notation, and more.

Links:

Rejected Episode Titles:

I’ve Just Got Two Short Ones
Keychain: It’s Not That Exciting
The Andrew Pontious and Wolf Rentzsch of Objective-C
Hell, There Might Have Been
Don’t You Use Oils, or Maybe Just Watercolors
That’s What You Listeners Do, You Spite Us
First Person Who Gets That Reference Gets a Free T-Shirt, If We Had T-Shirts, Which We Don’t, So, Sorry
Not Too Long Ago but Not Too Short Ago
They Just Shred It, Basically
The Real World vs the Interview World
Did I Just Say Growing as a Transitive Verb? Sorry About That
I Know That Sounds Like BS
It Makes Me Wary
It Sounds Like Higher Billing Rate Bullshit
Interchangeable Cogs
If You Want to Have the Most Doors Open
Ermahgerd, You Worked at Apple!
You’re Not Going to Complain That I’m Stealing Your Topic
Did I Just Fail the Test?
I Hate Hate Hate Trick Questions
Oh, He Couldn’t Answer That! Points Off!
But Seriously! “What’s a Category?” That’s the Best You Can Do?
Which Is Why I Would Never Ask That Question
He Was Kind of This Gruff Old Timer, I Think, Wolf, You Would’ve Liked Him
A Game of Telephone Tag
C’mooooon, Tell Me a Little More
It Probably Won’t Do Any Good
Interviews Still Pretty Much Suck
Do You Even Want to Play That Game
Putting the Biscuit on Your Nose but Not Letting You Bite It

Edge Cases 57: Both Praise and Condemn Keychain

Sat, 20 Jul 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Wolf Rentzsch talks with Andrew Pontious about the upsides and downsides as well as the history of OS X’s (and now iOS’s) Keychain.

Links:

Rejected Episode Titles:

Yes, Such a Newbie!
Internet Email, and DECMail, and CompuServe
The Only Part of PowerTalk That Survives
My Bad Attitude Kicked In
You Know It’s Going to Be Pain Right There
90s Bloatware Type Stuff
A Big Curmudgeon About This
They Had Some Sort of Ugly Baby
Write Like a Human Being
The Fair and Balanced Podcast of Tech
Doo-Doo Is Quite Relevant to the Keychain
I’m Already Trusting You a Heck of a Lot
It Kinda Is a Morass
I’m Sure There’s a Big White Paper
I Think You’re Out of Your Mind If You Do
Objective-C Has Won
Apple Backs Itself into Its Own Corner
This Is Why I Started the Podcast, So People Could Better Understand My Advice and Follow It to the Letter
FileDestroyer Instead of FileMaker
Passwords Are Horrible
They’ve Had a Good Run
A New World of Security Hurt
Passwords Are Passé
The Keychain Is Just So Legacy-Based
It’s So Old

Edge Cases 56: A Client of TestFlight

Sat, 13 Jul 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Andrew Pontious goes over with Wolf Rentzsch the basics of Apple’s code signing (or co-designing) infrastructure and how they help (or hinder) beta-testing distribution service TestFlight.

Links:

Rejected Episode Titles:

We Should Definitely Not Spend a Lot of Time Talking About How We Don’t Have a Lot of Time
Every Step of It Seemed Broken in a Unique Way
Team Something Something
One Thing I’m Also Going to Complain About Here
This Long String of Letter and Numbers and Dashes
I Found That to Be a Great Big Pain in the Butt
A Whole Bunch of Users Out There Who Just Don’t Sync
Well, It’s Really Bad, For One
But Not That Much Information
Pretty Much a Solved Problem
Actually, a Giganto-Huge Button
Which Is, Y’know, Arrgh, Annoying
So Please Come Back to Here
I Never Risked That
Can’t Be Arsed to Use iTunes
Anything with the Word ‘Monetization’ in It Is Usually Not Good
Some Extra information They Jam into the Crash Dump
Trying Too Hard to Be High Level
I Had a Chip on My Shoulder
This Is How Most Programmers Approach Most Things
How Can I Move On, How Can I Move On
The Depths of My Belligerence
Every Single Code Injection Guy Was in That Session
That’s When You Want the Xcode Magic

Edge Cases 55: The Pragmatic and the Academic

Sat, 06 Jul 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Wolf Rentzsch talks with Andrew Pontious about the pros and cons of two routes to programming knowledge: the self-taught way (employed by both hosts), and the top-down way of a computer science degree.

Links:

Rejected Episode Titles:

No Client Hyperthreading
The Act of Learning How to Write Software
Why We Have Circles in the First Place
Most of the People in My Bubble
I Like to Joke That I Have a Grade School Education
A Kid with a Computer and a Compiler
I, Like You, Was an Autodidact
I Overloaded the Word Scheme There
Any Field That Has the Word ‘Science’ in Its Name Probably Isn’t
Wow, How Many People Can We Piss Off?
Oh, That Problem Is Academic
Distinction Without a Difference
Our Recent Friend Auto Layout
Knowledge Helps You Give Up Earlier
Don’t All Computer Science Problems Eventually Boil Down to Sorting?
The Post-Opulent World
Wasting Time Is Crucial
I Can’t Believe I Used the Word ‘Proactive’, but Sometimes It Actually Fits
One Bad Programmer Can Easily Create Two New Jobs a Year
Make It Harder for Future Plumbers
“Is That Distinction…Academic?” “Touché.”
Underneath That Veneer of Productivity
Corporations Are Not Usually Shining Examples of Software Best Practices
You Have That Knowing Laugh
Every Corporation Is Broken in a Unique and Interesting Way
Even Academia Doesn’t Help You Here
Where Can You Turn? Who Will Save Us!?
You Need the Grizzled Veterans
I Speak Really Quickly and Use California Slang
A Lot of People Got Washed Away in the Bust
Software Eats the World
I Found a Port in the Storm
More Than One Boom Going on at the Same Time
Are You a Hoarder?
Helps to Be a Little Smarter Than…Stupid
“Where Does the Stack End?” “Where the Syrup Starts.”

Edge Cases 54: No Carbon This Time Around

Sat, 29 Jun 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Andrew Pontious talks with Wolf Rentzsch about the risks and burdens developers will face updating their apps for iOS 7.

Links:

Rejected Episode Titles:

When I Say ‘Cover’, of Course, I Mean Complain About
First, I’m Going to Pound the NDA
I’m a Dub Dub Old-Timer
Me in All My Flabby, Pale Glory
Go Away, I Will Tell You Nothing!
If It Is the Reason They Do It, It’s a Really Stupid Reason
It Prevents the People You Do Want to Have Have It From Having It (Title!)
Apparently, There Were Quite a Few Screenshots
That Was a One-Off, or Maybe a One-and-a-Half-Off
They Ran out of Cats at an Inconvenient Time
The Sheer Amount of Man-Hours
Hastily-Constructed Bedrock
The Granddaddy of Telling Your Developers to Do Lots of Things
And Everybody Said…No
Let’s Put a Squeeze on Our Developers
How Apple Is Going to Handle Losing
The Mac and iOS Intelligentsia
Because We’re Human Beings
I Would Be That Bucket of Cold Water
I’m in Wineman’s Camp
I’m Really Bad at Aging Babies
Apple Is Not Full of Stupid People

Edge Cases 53: The Poetry of Donald Rumsfeld

Fri, 21 Jun 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Wolf Rentzsch talks about software estimation with Andrew Pontious and why he’s given up even trying (hint: he found something that works better).

Links:

Rejected Episode Titles:

I Think It’s Important That the People Who Don’t Follow Us on Twitter Are Somehow Punished
We’re Not Topical
How Long Do You Think the Show’s Going to Be?
I Liked the Code Complete Before It Was Cool
He Was Willing to Play Ball with Me
It’s Pretty Endemic
I Found a New Guru
You Know, You’re Such a Programmer
We Can Throw Science at This
Infinitely Copyable Bits
I Should Say “Cat”
I Could Go on and on About the Rot of Our Profession
I’m All About Plying You with Bad Metaphors
A Lot of Thrusting Going On in This Episode
It Mixes a Time-Tracking Program with a Project-Management Program Mixed with a Bug-Tracker-Type Thing
A Really Big Merge Problem
You Gotta Ship for Dub Dub
I Basically Have Given Up Trying to Estimate Software
My Bitterness Kind of Soaks in There
Bolting Things Together and Writing a Bunch of Glue Code
That Can Be a Big Pill to Swallow
It Helps with Human Nature

Edge Cases 52: The iOS Version of Cocoa Bindings

Sat, 01 Jun 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Andrew Pontious talks with Wolf Rentzsch about the odd duck that is NSFetchedResultsController, as well as a bunch of Core Data issues, such as using SUBQUERY. Reminder: no podcast next week, due to WWDC.

Links:

Rejected Episode Titles:

I’m Trying to Avoid the Fluffier Episodes
There Has to Be a Marriage Involved
Our Deadly Feud About the Pronunciation of Core Data
I Love Me Some French People
I’m So Terrible at This, I’m Sorry
The Big Hash Table That’s My Mind
A Dangerous Dependency
You Threw Like Three Weird Metaphors at Me and Then You Ask Me If That’s Right!?
Uhh, Split Infinitive
The Text of the Magic Spell Thrown into Your Project
It’s Hard to Say Boilerplate Many Times Fast
Everybody Just Slunk Away Without Wanting to Say Any More
I Actually Was Going to Say Deplicable, Which Is a New Word
We Have Tables on Mac Apps Too
Apple Fell into Its Own Trap
Cocoa Bindings Will Be Ported to iOS When Hell Freezes Over
That Can Be Awkward
And Here is How You Use Subquery!
You Can Batch That Up Exactly as You Please
I Know the Guy, He’s a Bastard
The Stub Item Issue
Fetched vs. Fetch
It’s Biting Me Right Now
No Real Skin off Your Nose, Skin off Your Back, What?
Metaphors Are Just Crazy Today
Suddenly You Fall off the Cliff
That Is a Rich Vein
I Was Just Doing the Math Myself
It’s a Bunch of Bookkeeping

Edge Cases 51: Your Logging System Isn't Advanced Enough

Sat, 25 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Wolf Rentzsch continues the conversation about logging with Andrew Pontious, including a spirited debate on the merits of levels, his own logging package JRLog, and Cocoa Lumberjack.

Links:

Rejected Episode Titles:

I’m Sorry—Blogging, What? Flogging? Slogging? Clogging?
The Disease of Us Self-Taught Learner People
Kind of in the Mysterious Mode There
Wrote It off Totally and Stayed the Hell Away
If You’ve Been Burned, Then That Doesn’t Help You Anyway
I Didn’t Want to Steal Your Show
Scar Tissue
Here Be Dragons, Thank You
Take It All Out, Take It ALL Out
Against the Idea of Levels Altogether
The Info Still Is a Lot More Chatty
I’m This App and I’m Doing This Thing
Then You Rip It Back Out
Throwing Everything and the Kitchen Sink in There
I’m Definitely on Your Side
I’m More Worried About Our Fragile Human Minds
I Don’t Want That Thing on All the Time
Spray and Pray
We Could Use the Power of Logic
The Granddaddy of Java Logging Systems
All Those Multiple Levels I Know You Super-Love
Even Though It Pissed Me Off Every Time I Used It
Getting the Debug Spew You Want
There’s a Lot of Underscores There
I Don’t Think I Can Go Back
Everyone’s Gonna Want to Use It Now
The Beginner’s Mind on It Again
Hopefully That Will Scare Away Some of Our Listeners
It’s a Gross Hack, but Pretty Fun
Evidence of a Wound
There’s No Panacea Here
Logorrhoea

Edge Cases 50: The Graffiti of the Software Development World

Sat, 18 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Andrew Pontious talks about logging with Wolf Rentzsch, including Xcode breakpoint actions and the Apple System Log. Plus: lots of CocoaPods followup, and a surprise ending!

Links:

Rejected Episode Titles:

Something and the Something
By “Extensive” I Mean Three People Have Talked to Us
Put That in the Hopper
That’s a Very Sad Version of Spin the Bottle
It Sounds Like Auto Layout
I’m Willy Nilly
I Will Call It for You
But It’s Painful and Ugly
The Magic Was in the Shared Cache
You Want Me to Sing the Lumberjack Song?
You Must Be This Tall to Ride
I Need to Stand up for Logging
It Really Does Feel like Java
That Seems to Be Enough to Kick It
I’m the One Who Gets Cut Off
Things Can Get Pretty Chatty
What NSLog Spits Out
You’ve Heard Me Complain About This Before
There’s Got to Be a Better Way, but There Isn’t a Better Way
I Need Levels That I Need
I Want to See What I Want to See
Each One Is Kind of Beefy in Its Own Right
We’ll Keep It Going Like Volleyball

Edge Cases 49: I Do Care a Lot About Dependencies

Sat, 11 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Wolf Rentzsch talks with Andrew Pontious about the upsides and downsides of CocoaPods, as well as other techniques for sharing code and tracking dependencies between projects.

Links:

Rejected Episode Titles:

I Heard About It from You
I Wouldn’t Say They’re Hostile to Providing a Solution, But I Don’t Think They Ever Really Will
In the Bold iOS Era
I’ve Even Witnessed Open Hostility
I Did Not Write the Podspec
Would the Command Be, “Open the Pod Bay Doors, Hal”?
The Dependency Hell Pain
MacRuby Might Be the Worst of Both Worlds
The Horrible Podfile Format
I’m Not Sure You’re Guilty, but I’m Definitely Guilty
Maybe We’ll Get That at Dub Dub
We Hit the Runtime Wall
In the Bold Software Future
Frameworks Kind of Got a Bad Wrap
Functionality Roach Motel
Heard This at Dub Dub, So Pretty Sure It’s True
Even Debugging Works
Somewhat Difficult to Retrieve
Putting Landmines in Your Project
Fine-Grained Is the Way to Do Things
This Formatting War Going On
The Diff Looks Pretty Brutal
Use Helmo’s Fork

Edge Cases 48: I Don't Finish the Books

Sat, 04 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

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

Edge Cases 47: Slinging CGRects Around

Sat, 27 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

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

Edge Cases 46: Rectangles on a String

Sat, 20 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

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

Edge Cases 45: One Little Package of Hate

Sat, 13 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

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

Edge Cases 44: Putting Your Scent on the Code

Sat, 06 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

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

Edge Cases 43: Don't Expect Anything To Work

Sat, 30 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0700

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

Edge Cases 42: In a UI Tarpit

Sun, 24 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0700

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

Edge Cases 41: The Tofu Scale

Sat, 16 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0700

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

Edge Cases 40: Heroic Measures

Sat, 09 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0800

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

Edge Cases 39: Productivity Porn

Sat, 02 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0800

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

Edge Cases 38: A Programmer and a Puzzler

Sat, 23 Feb 2013 00:00:00 -0800

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

Edge Cases 37: In the Tree of Your TODO List

Sat, 16 Feb 2013 00:00:00 -0800

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

Edge Cases 36: A Zeno's Paradox of Authentication

Sat, 09 Feb 2013 00:00:00 -0800

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

Edge Cases 35: Their Job Is to Break It

Sun, 03 Feb 2013 00:00:00 -0800

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

Edge Cases 34: Xcode, I Want to Get Organized!

Sun, 27 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0800

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

Edge Cases 33: Flattry Will Get You Everywhere

Sat, 19 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0800

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

Edge Cases 32: The Case Against Xcode Plugins

Sat, 12 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0800

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

Edge Cases 31: The Turing Frights

Sat, 05 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0800

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

Edge Cases 30: One Ring to Cocoa-Bind Them All

Sat, 08 Dec 2012 00:00:00 -0800

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

Edge Cases 29: Squirting Code Across Address Spaces

Sun, 02 Dec 2012 00:00:00 -0800

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

Edge Cases 28: The Plumber's Guide to Blocks

Sat, 24 Nov 2012 00:00:00 -0800

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

Edge Cases 27: Where mogenerator Really Picks It Up

Sun, 18 Nov 2012 00:00:00 -0800

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

Edge Cases 26: You Can't Run a Script to Test Feel

Sat, 10 Nov 2012 00:00:00 -0800

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

Edge Cases 25: We're Just Dot-J, Baby

Fri, 02 Nov 2012 00:00:00 -0700

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

Edge Cases 24: Make Xibs Look Good

Fri, 26 Oct 2012 00:00:00 -0700

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:

Abbott and Costello « Wikipedia
letterpress « atebits
Murphy Brown « Wikipedia
5by5 | The Incomparable #111: These Go to Eleven
Statler and Waldorf « Wikipedia
The Muppet Show « Wikipedia
carpeaqua by Justin Williams
Justin Williams tweet: “@rentzsch @edgecasesshow @apontious I love you guys because you’re the Statler and Waldorf of Objective-C” (tweet deleted, no link)
Andrew Pontious tweet: “Serious question: of myself and @rentzsch… who’s Statler, and who’s Waldorf?”
A Little Slice of Windows in My IDE « Edge Cases
My 30 Day AppCode Challenge « Shiney Code
Nib and Xibs and Storyboards, O My « Edge Cases
Using Core Data with iCloud Release Notes
Shiney Code tweet: “Very helpful article on bridging the gap between Git and Xcode: http://robots.thoughtbot.com/post/33796217972/xcode-and-git-bridging-the-gap”
Vector clock « Wikipedia
Operational transformation « Wikipedia
Website wireframes: Mockingbird
Pear Note for Mac
Persistent Data Structures and Managed References, by Rich Hickey
In the Magical World of Threads « Edge Cases

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

Edge Cases 23: The Elevator Pitch for Design by Contract

Sat, 20 Oct 2012 00:00:00 -0700

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?

Edge Cases 22: Nibs and Xibs and Storyboards, O My

Sat, 13 Oct 2012 00:00:00 -0700

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

Edge Cases 21: When the Bits Hit the Platter

Fri, 05 Oct 2012 00:00:00 -0700

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

Edge Cases 20: The Tabs and Spaces of Outrageous Fortune

Sat, 29 Sep 2012 00:00:00 -0700

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

Edge Cases 19: In the Magical World of Threads

Fri, 21 Sep 2012 00:00:00 -0700

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

Edge Cases 18: Port the Present into the Past

Sat, 15 Sep 2012 00:00:00 -0700

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

Edge Cases 17: Then, You're Just Writing C++

Sun, 09 Sep 2012 00:00:00 -0700

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

Edge Cases 16: Talk Like a Developer

Sun, 02 Sep 2012 00:00:00 -0700

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

Edge Cases 15: Brave New World of Interprocess Communication

Fri, 24 Aug 2012 00:00:00 -0700

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

Edge Cases 14: Maintenance and the Cocoa Slide

Sun, 19 Aug 2012 00:00:00 -0700

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

Edge Cases 13: AppleScript's Glorious Failure

Sat, 11 Aug 2012 00:00:00 -0700

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’”

Edge Cases 12: A Little Slice of Windows in My IDE

Sat, 04 Aug 2012 00:00:00 -0700

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

Edge Cases 11: Pop Software

Sun, 29 Jul 2012 00:00:00 -0700

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

Edge Cases 10: Not a Free-Range Developer

Sat, 21 Jul 2012 00:00:00 -0700

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

Edge Cases 9: Alien Reference Counting

Sat, 14 Jul 2012 00:00:00 -0700

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

Edge Cases 8: iPhone to Every Man, Woman, and Child

Sun, 08 Jul 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Andrew Pontious talks with Wolf Rentzsch about Apple’s growth and how it will affect developers.

Links:

Rejected Episode Titles:

Holding the iSight Up to My Face
Throwing It Up the Charts
Put Away Their iPad and Pull Out a Dell
Happy As a Pig in Slop
Definitely Not a Spindler
Awesome in the Tim Cook Way
The Flying Saucer That’s Landed
An Intel Core I7 Sticker on My MacBook Air
Another Upper for a Topic

Edge Cases 7: If You Look at the Error, You Will Crash

Sat, 30 Jun 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Wolf Rentzsch rants (there’s that word again) with Andrew Pontious about Apple’s NSError implementation, while also giving a brief history of Mac/Unix error handling and introducing his new JRErr library, which makes NSError usage easier.

Links:

Rejected Episode Titles:

Release My Cushion
The Lie of Try-Catch
Hypothetical Drug-Addicted Little Sister
You’ve Got Booleans and You’ve Got Pointers, Haha
God Help Me, Apple Events!
All the Badness That Is NSError
A Magic Cocoa Wand We Could Wave
NSTherapy

Edge Cases 6: For You, I'll File a Radar

Sat, 23 Jun 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Andrew Pontious lays out with Wolf Rentzsch three things Apple can do to turn bug reporting into a virtuous cycle, not the vicious cycle it is now. They also discuss problems with the Apple Developer Forums.

Links:

Rejected Episode Titles:

Radar or GTFO
Real Fire That You Can’t Reproduce
File, File, File, File, File
You and Your Science!

Edge Cases 5: The Ping of Installer Technologies

Fri, 22 Jun 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Wolf Rentzsch talks with Andrew Pontious about the developer ramifications of Apple’s new MacBook Pro Retina displays and the dismal state of third-party library updating infrastructures on the Mac.

Links:

Rejected Episode Titles:

Almost as Bad as You Can Imagine
A Layer on Top of the Magical Purity
Minimize Surface Area
Inside the Veal Pen
Solved Rocket Science
The World’s Most Unfortunate Acronym

Edge Cases 4: My First Xcode 4 Rant

Thu, 21 Jun 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Andrew Pontious rants (but not mindlessly) with Wolf Rentzsch about problems in the Xcode 4 project window.

Links:

Rejected Episode Titles:

The Double Broom
The Big Fuzzy Scrollbar
Wolf Tracks
Low-Bandwidth Form of Tracking That Only Requires a Single Finger
Ears on Both Sides and Chin Hanging Down
Programming on Ice
Killing Off the Swoopy

Edge Cases 3: Sandboxing Day

Wed, 20 Jun 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Wolf Rentzsch talks with Andrew Pontious about his blog post “Mac App Store vs Buying Direct”.

Links:

Rejected Episode Titles:

I File Every Day
In Their Various Bloggy Ways
Three Shows of Me Just Pulling My Hair Out
Missile Command
I Try to Live My Life Away from PDFs
Insert Your Version of Thanksgiving Here
It Might Eventually Cut Your Head Off
Hit the Yes Button Till They Get to the Dancing Bunnies
A Revolt of the Nerds
Scary Little Panels

Edge Cases 2: Would They Call it iCode?

Fri, 25 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Andrew Pontious talks with Wolf Rentzsch about a version of Xcode for the iPad. Is it possible? What would or should it look it? Is it likely?

Links:

Rejected Episode Titles:

Arrow Floaty Roundy Thing
A Whole Bunch of Clang Engineers
Rule Number Four: No UI Fiddling
No Building Photoshop
Disintegrated Development Environment
Let’s Not Talk About What the Hammer Signifies
Plucking That Low-Hanging Fruit
Cram More Punctuation into the Keyboard
Ambient Background Noise That You Paid Extra For
No More Weird Method-Swizzling Tricks
Squeezing Unix Till It Cried Uncle

Edge Cases 1: Dot-Mom and Apple Pie

Sun, 13 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

In this inaugural podcast, Wolf Rentzsch talks with Andrew Pontious about the good parts and the bad parts of Core Data.

Links: