Beware of ARMv6-only iOS libraries

“What the f…1 is going on?” There I was, one day at work, trying to figure out why this iOS project wouldn’t link, giving the error “Undefined symbols for architecture armv7:” with the missing symbols being the entry points of a third-party library that was just added. Which made no sense at all, as the [...]

A few things I would have liked to read about in John Siracusa’s Lion review

Yesterday we saw a few things that John Siracusa didn’t mention in his Snow Leopard review but that I think could have been in talked about in there. Today we will do the same with his Lion review. The same disclaimer applies: John can’t know everything or mention everything, so do not construe anything I [...]

A few complements to John Siracusa’s Snow Leopard review

I always read John Siracusa’s review of the latest Mac OS X release with great interest, and he always delivers. Such is the case again with his review of Mac OS X Snow Leopard, which is of particular interest as for this release Apple teased only “one new feature” (Microsoft Exchange support), and John does [...]

Developer ID might not seem restrictive, but it is

I need to talk about Gatekeeper and Developer ID. In short, I am very uncomfortable with this previewed security feature of Mountain Lion. Apple is trying to assure that users are only going to be safer and that developers are still going to be able to do business as usual, but the Mac ecosystem is [...]

Goodbye, NXP Software

For the last four years, starting before this blog even began, I have been working as a contractor programmer for NXP Software. Or rather had been, as the mission has now ended, effective 1st of January 2012. It was a difficult decision to take, and I will miss among other things the excellent office ambience, [...]

GCC is dead, long live the young LLVM

(Before I get flamed, I’m talking of course of GCC in the context of the toolchains provided by Apple for Mac and iOS development; the GCC project is still going strong, of course.) You have no doubt noticed that GCC disappeared from the Mac OS X developer tools install starting with Lion; if you do [...]

Benefits (and drawback) to compiling your iOS app for ARMv7

In “A few things iOS developers ought to know about the ARM architecture”, I talked about ARMv6 and ARMv7, the two ARM architecture versions that iOS supports, but I didn’t touch on an important point: why you would want to compile for one or the other, or even both (thanks to Jasconius at Stack Overflow [...]

April’s Fools 2011

So, if you read my previous post before today… April’s fools! And not in the way you might think. This behavior of the iPad 2 is real, I did not make it up, I did indeed verify it this week. The joke is that I claimed to be surprised, hoping to make people believe this [...]

ARM multicore systems such as the iPad 2 feature a weakly ordered memory model

At the time of this writing, numerous multicore ARM devices are either shipping or set to ship; handsets, of course, but more interestingly this wave of tablets, in particular the iPad 2 (but not only it), seems to be generally based around multicore ARM chips, be it the Tegra 2 from nVidia, or the OMAP [...]

First Impressions of the Mac App Store

I try to be original in the subjects I tackle, but if you are a Mac user, there is no escaping the Mac App Store, which is probably the most important thing to happen to the Macintosh platform since Mac OS X, at least. It remains to be seen whether it will be in a [...]