Reverse engineering Xcode with dtrace

Both OS X and iOS tend to have a love-hate relationship with Xcode. Crashing, lacking solid refactoring tools, some UX failures, and so on. For me, it is/was [https://github.com/chendo/FuzzyAutocompletePlugin] the lack of a good autocomplete…

Visualising CGRects and NSRects from lldb with drawrect

Halfway through debugging the new enumeration engine for Shortcat [https://shortcatapp.com/], I realised I needed a way to visualise CGRect/NSRect s while debugging. Trying to figure out how one CGRect relates to another by looking at four numbers…

Building a Command Line OS X app with RubyMotion

I decided to write a command line tool with RubyMotion [http://rubymotion.com/] to visualise CGRects and NSRects from lldb [https://chen.do/blog/2013/10/04/visualising-rects-from-lldb/], but I quickly discovered that RubyMotion does not support this out of…

Selectively ignoring Objective-C exceptions in Xcode

Edit - Octorber 9, 2013: Updated the script to support iOS Simulator (i386) and iPhone 5S (ARM 64bit). Xcode has the ability to break on all Objective-C exceptions (Debug > Breakpoints > Create Exception Breakpoint...), which is extremely useful as you can…

Running individual specs with RubyMotion

I'm testing parts of Shortcat [http://shortcatapp.com/] (which as of v0.4.0 is in Objective-C) with RubyMotion [http://www.rubymotion.com/], which is pretty nifty since I'm much more comfortable in Ruby than Objective-C and writing tests is…

Showing the Crash Dialog for Backgrounded Cocoa Apps

While developing Shortcat [http://shortcatapp.com], I ran into an extremely annoying problem with LSUIElement apps: They crash silently, giving the user no indication that it has crashed. This is especially bad when you don't have any visual indicator that…