I’ve written an custom formatter to make it even more awesome. It will give you output like this:

[CC]

2010-09-09 15:38:58:125(207) [AppDelegate application:didFinishLaunchingWithOptions:/59] app is starting up…

[/CC]

Look again. You get:

• Log Level (Info is omitted, can be Verbose, Warn, Error)
• Exact Timestamp
• Thread ID
• Class
• Function Name
• Line Number (wooot!)
• Message

Have fun!

Related posts:

1. Better logging for iOS and Mac: cocoalumberjack
2. Better iPhone/Mac logging with GTMLogger
3. iPhone gaming framework

(Well, that’s not all.. you still need to either code [description] or make another category for it. I didn’t want to override base NSObject, so I just use it for NSManagedObject)

Download NSObject+AutoDescription

NSObject+AutoDescription.h
[CC]
// thanks to Kendall Helmstetter Geln
// http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2299841/objective-c-introspection-reflection
@interface NSObject (AutoDescription)

+ (NSString *) autoDescribe:(id)instance classType:(Class)classType;
+ (NSString *) autoDescribe:(id)instance;

@end
[/CC]

NSObject+AutoDescription.m
[CC]
#import “NSObject+AutoDescription.h”

@implementation NSObject(AutoDescription)

// Finds all properties of an object, and prints each one out as part of a string describing the class.
+ (NSString *) autoDescribe:(id)instance classType:(Class)classType
{
NSUInteger count;
objc_property_t *propList = class_copyPropertyList(classType, &count);
NSMutableString *propPrint = [NSMutableString string];

for ( int i = 0; i < count; i++ )
{
objc_property_t property = propList[i];

const char *propName = property_getName(property);
NSString *propNameString =[NSString stringWithCString:propName encoding:NSASCIIStringEncoding];

if(propName)
{
id value = [instance valueForKey:propNameString];
[propPrint appendString:[NSString stringWithFormat:@"%@=%@ ; ", propNameString, value]];
}
}
free(propList);

// Now see if we need to map any superclasses as well.
Class superClass = class_getSuperclass( classType );
if ( superClass != nil && ! [superClass isEqual:[NSObject class]] )
{
NSString *superString = [self autoDescribe:instance classType:superClass];
[propPrint appendString:superString];
}

return propPrint;
}

+ (NSString *) autoDescribe:(id)instance
{
NSString *headerString = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"%@:%p:: ",[instance class], instance];
return [headerString stringByAppendingString:[self autoDescribe:instance classType:[instance class]]];
}

@end
[/CC]

Related posts:

1. NSDateFormatter and +00:00 parsing
2. Detect if an iPhone is jailbroken
3. Namespaces and ObjectiveC

http://wiki.github.com/effectiveprogramming/ep-iphone/uitableviewcell

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3. This week’s links

Get started (Goole Code Wiki)

You might be thinking “logging is boring”.

But what if I told you that by using the framework you can actually make your application faster because it is an order of magnitude faster than NSLog?

What if I told you that the framework could allow you to debug your iPhone application remotely, by viewing its log statements in real time, via your web browser?

Introducing Cocoa Lumberjack

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1. Custom Formatter for the cocoalumberjack logging framework
2. Better iPhone/Mac logging with GTMLogger
3. Objective C != Operator overloading

Then i found THIS.

Somebody wrote a wrapper for NSFetchedResultsController called SafeFetchedResultsController, that fixes bugs that are there since it’s first release (tested on iOS 4.1). Apple has to be aware of this, but maybe they don’t fix it because it must certainly would break existing applications.

This wrapper is a direct replacement, it subclasses Apple’s class, carefully analyzes the update messages and fixes them if they are wrong. And guess what… it works! It’s so great to finally fix this issue and enable smooth animations instead of the brutal (but working) [tableView reloadData].

So if your app is crashing randomly with messages like “Exception was caught during Core Data change processing”, this one is for you.

Related posts:

1. on fixing symbolicatecrash
2. The Facebook-App Situation
3. Core Animation Crash: Attempt to create two animations for cell

[CC]
// fix styled text for apersand problems
styledText = [styledText stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:@"&" withString:@"&"];
[/CC]

Other than that, TTStyledText is plain awesome, so is the whole three2 framework (extracted from the facebook iPhone App)

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1. NSDateFormatter and +00:00 parsing
2. Building better iPhone apps with three20
3. A better Open Quickly: PeepOpen

After further investigation, the problem was an almost unnoticeable difference in the date format:

2010-05-17T19:08:11+02:00
But the unicode standard needs a +0200, thus NO Semicolon.
NSDateFormatter for 10.5 and OS3 just silently quit parsing, and because he then assumed 00 nobody noticed.
The behaviour on 10.6 and OS4 changed to be totally strict now.

Prior to Mac OS 10.6, both NSNumberFormatter’s and NSDateFormatter’s implementation of -getObjectValue:forString:errorDescription: would return YES and a parsed object value if only part of the string could be parsed. This is problematic because with this API you cannot be sure what portion of the string was parsed. For applications linked on or after Mac OS 10.6, this method instead returns an error if part of the string cannot be parsed. You can use -getObjectValue:forString:range:error: to get the old behavior; this method returns the range of the substring that was successfully parsed.

See this code example. The “fix” is code line nr.2 (stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString)
That’s not a perfect solution, it won’t work in wanky half-hour timezones, but i don’t need to parse such data.

Another solution would be a) using the old parse method (getObjectValue:forString:range:error) or use an NSMutableString to search for the last semicolon to purge.

Note the testDebugStr, that’s the best solution to debug Date Formatters. (so obvious…)

[CC lang="objc"]
NSDateFormatter* dateFormatter = [[NSDateFormatter alloc] init];
[dateFormatter setTimeStyle:NSDateFormatterFullStyle];
dateFormatter.locale = [[[NSLocale alloc] initWithLocaleIdentifier:@”en_US”] autorelease];
[dateFormatter setDateFormat:@"yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ssZZZ"];

NSString *dateStr = [[entry objectForKey:@"published"] objectForXMLNode];
// we need to strip out the single colon
dateStr = [dateStr stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:@":00" withString:@"00"];
NSString *testDebugStr = [dateFormatter stringFromDate:[NSDate date]];
NSDate* date = [dateFormatter dateFromString:dateStr];
GTMLoggerInfo(@”%@ %@ %@”, testDebugStr, dateStr, [date description]);
[/CC]

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OmniUI/iPad:
- First release of this framework!
- Includes a bunch of features from our iPad apps
- Document picker, basic document-based application support
- CoreText-based text editor (still a work in progress, but a great start)
- We’ll be working more on performance for large blobs of text, which we
haven’t needed yet.
- Zooming/tiling scroll view system
- Extensible inspector system; includes full font and color inspectors
(palette, hsv, rgb, gray)
- widgets (thumb wheel, color swatches, toggle buttons, matching segmented
control, editable text well)
- Support for sending feedback, exporting documents/PDF via Mail,
documentation, etc.
- See examples in OmniGroup/Frameworks/OmniUI/iPad/Examples
- The text editor example is still in progress, but isn’t fully hooked up
yet (no inspectors yet)
- Gesture recognizer debugging helper (logs all events and state changes)
- “Direct” tap recognizer subclass
- Overlay hint view (for example, showing the % zoom level while in the middle
of a zoom gesture).
- Basic RTF reading/writing

OmniQuartz:
- First release of this framework!
- Includes a subset as a static library OmniQuartzTouch target for iPhone OS.
- Includes lots of CALayer debugging support, helpers (log all animations,
logging of layer trees, vector output for layer trees)
- Includes some basic drawing routings for
- Includes some simple CoreImage utilities
- Includes a class cluster of color component preserving color classes.
UIColor is more “build-only”. OQColor remembers the components you gave it and
acts more like a model object (including XML and plist archiving support based
on NSColor(OAExtensions)).
- Includes delayed layer removal animations (since removing a layer normally
is instantaneous in CA unless you want default animation).
- Includes a (perspective correct) view transition flip animation
- Includes a ‘hole’ layer.

Go clone it!

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2. Fiddling with Reachability code?
3. The Omni Group’s frameworks

The reason is not that awesome. It was rejected for “Contradicting iPad’s User Experience”

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3. Crash Reports on the iPhone

[CC lang='objc']
NSArray * foo = SomeFunctionReturningAnNSArray();
NSMutableArray * bar = [foo mutableCopy];
[foo release];
[/CC]

What other treasure lie around the Foundation?

[CC lang='objc']
NSMutableArray *foo = SomeFunctionReturningAnNSMutableArray();
NSArray * bar = [foo copy];
[foo release];
[/CC]

That’s actually pretty useful! NSArray is both faster and needs less memory than his mutable counterpart.

Related posts:

1. Better iPhone/Mac logging with GTMLogger
2. Core Data Notes from iPhone Tech Talk