Cocoa Odds-and-Ends for Nov.3.06

It's an all-Cocoa episode of Odds and Ends, chopped, diced and sliced for your pleasure.

In case you somehow missed it, Daniel Jalkut has an excellent writeup on the reworked, HIG-violating user interface in FlexTime 1.1.

The Google Mac blog talks about the performance of the @synchronized construct in Objective-C. Plot spoiler: it's a recursive lock, so it's a bit slower than you might want. They use pthreads locks, but promise a follow-up. Another options is good 'ol NSLock.

Andy Finnel has a technique for dynamic transient attributes in Core Data (short version: he overrides -valueForUndefinedKey). In the comments for the article, Jakob Stoklund Olesen mentions his writeup for handling dynamic attributes from a different perspective. (Full disclosure: I only skimmed these, but somebody might need them).

RogueSheep has published RSControls, which is a set of three controls, most notably two in the style of buttons that appear at the bottom-left of the Tiger Mail window.

Apple's Technote TN2124 describes "secret" debugging techniques. There's a ton of info here. Not everyone will read it straight through, but a good reference.

Finally, some new-ish Cocoa blogs:

Lap Cat Software (works on Vienna): http://lapcatsoftware.com/blog/
Vacuous Virtuoso (works on Shiira): http://dev.lipidity.com/

Though not strictly Cocoa (though maybe useful for subclassers), Jacob Rus has some great articles on key bindings in the Mac OS X text system.

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