360|MacDev Paper Submissions
So the folks behind 360|iDev are now putting together a Mac-focussed conference titled 360|MacDev. They put out a call for papers a couple of days ago and I made a few submissions, reproduced below. Do any of these sound interesting, whether presented at the conference or made available separately? Sound off in the comments or you can ping me via Twitter to @alanquatermain if that suits you better.
Inside the Objective-C Runtime
Learn the inner workings of the Objective-C runtime and what you can do with them. Define and modify objects and classes at runtime, generate code, and implement Ruby-style Mixins. Debug system classes by swapping around core methods with your own overrides.
Secret Source: How to use or duplicate Apple’s private functionality
Ever wanted to hook your own data into Apple’s Managed Client infrastructure? Watched Address Book or iPhoto’s integration with the Time Machine user interface in envy? Wished you could implement your own login dialog or account access filters on the Macintosh? Come and See as we open the seventh seal and gaze deep into the workings of some of OS X’s most coveted internal workings.
Power Behind the Throne: The real APIs behind the power of Cocoa
The Cocoa system provides a great deal of power to both new and seasoned developers, but needs must provide a more limited API to maintain its simplicity and grace. This session will look at the other APIs on Mac OS X, showing how Cocoa (probably!) works its magic, teaching you how and when to drop to lower-level APIs to gain more finely-grained control over your application’s interactions with the system.
Parallel Parsers: Tactics for using GCD in your data handling
Grand Central Dispatch has a great many uses, but with some of the common use types it can seem unintuitive to make use of it while parsing a large XML file or traversing a tightly-packed trie. Learn how to break up normally serialized data tasks into concurrent blocks of work while still keeping a close rein on resources and processor activity. At the end of this session we will have a working GCD-based parallel XML parser capable of handling massive blocks of complex XML data in record time!
