Concurrent Programming with Many Mes

I had the pleasure of recording another Late Night Cocoa podcast over at the Mac Developer Network. This time I blabbled about concurrent programming, including some chatting about NSOperation.

If you know something about Cocoa programming, I’d like to encourage you to do a LNC podcast. Scotty is a pleasure to work with.

Chunky text in Pages

I’ve been using Pages for writing new AMOSXP chapters, and for the most part, it’s a pleasant experience. I’ve just about got the NSOperation chapter put to bed, and was making a PDF to send off to the first round of reviewers, when I noticed the generated PDF output was beyond horrible. Here’s what it looked like on-screen:

and here’s what the resulting PDF looked like:

Hideous, isn’t it?

Turns out that Pages is honoring the “Turn off text smoothing for font sizes x and smaller” when generating the PDF, and using bitmaps for the smaller font sizes. I have that set to “12 and smaller” because anti-aliasing plus my eye correction conspire to make things difficult to read. Why Pages is using this setting for PDFs is beyond my comprehension (and I hope it’s just a bug – VoodooPad does the RightThing. Filed Radar 5698417). You’d think that PDFs are being made for someone else’s consumption, and so wouldn’t carry along personal preferences like this.

Release In Order

My cow-orker, Mike Morton, gave me a little bit of advice over a year ago that’s proven to be incredibly useful: “In your -dealloc, release objects in the same order they’re listed in the @interface“. This makes it really easy to double-check your work and make sure you’re releasing everything you need to. It also makes maintenance easier: skim down your -dealloc and compare to your @interface before you land your code.

Macworld 2008

It’s Macworld 2008 time. I had Google Booth Bunny duty on tuesday. When I wasn’t working the booth, I wandered around the show floor with a camera, with the obligatory web gallery.