User Groups and Conferences

Come See Us at CocoaConf DC!

Our own Jonathan Lehr is scheduled to present two sessions at the June, 2012 CocoaConf, in Herndon, VA. Session details are as follows:

Understanding Interface Builder

Beginner Level

Interface Builder can be incredibly mysterious to new Cocoa developers. What’s the difference between a nib file and a xib file (not to mention a storyboard)? What are those File’s Owner and First Responder thingies? What are IBOutlet, IBAction, and IBOutletCollection, and how do you use them to make connections to your code? In this session we'll explore these and other Interface Builder mysteries by taking a look at how it actually works under the hood. You should come away with a solid conceptual grasp that will allow you to take fuller advantage of this insanely powerful tool.

Objective-C Runtime Magic

Intermediate Level

On the one hand, the Objective-C runtime is amazingly powerful, and exposes public APIs that allow developers to easily take advantage of nearly all its capabilities. On the other hand, developers often find themselves too busy to delve into this kind of stuff, so the runtime system's capabilities tend to be overlooked. Well, here's your opportunity to delve! In this session, you'll gain deeper insight into how message dispatching works, and learn how to take advantage of some very cool, built-in features of NSObject to do things like message broadcasting and forwarding. You'll also learn how to do some magical things with the runtime C library API, including method swizzling (wherein you change a method's implementation dynamically), isa swizzling (wherein you turn an object into an instance of a different class at runtime), and other things too wild to even mention here (…so you'll just have to see the presentation).

To view the complete conference schedule, click here.

Recent Talks

CocoaHeads DC, November, 2011

Jonathan Lehr, Fun with the Objective-C Runtime

A practical overview of some potentially useful, advanced techniques that leverage the Objective-C runtime system, in two parts, as presented at a recent CocoaHeads DC user group meeting. Part One examines some NSObject methods that support forwarding method invocations to another object. Part Two looks at a subset of the runtime C library, focusing on functions that allow method implementations to be 'swizzled' (exchanged) dynamically.

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