Debugging Autorelease is a great wiki entry at CocoaDev. EXC_BAD_ACCESS, meaning accessing an object you’ve already released (most likely) or have not yet instantiated (it happens) isn’t that fun to debug. Luckily, the NSZombie environment variable works when developing for iPhone as well, and I could find the error that had cost me most of my day. Yay! Other good resources for debugging are Debugging Techniques and Mac OS X Debugging Magic

The mac world is high on expectations because of what is apparently a shortage of iPhones. New version coming up soon? Yes, probably. People hope for a 3G version. I hope for one too. I expect it to be announced in June and available end August. People think of a 32gb version. Sounds logical. But didn’t people notice Intel’s announcement of their Atom processor? Here’s ZDNet’s take on it. I would expect this to mean that an iPhone based on this architecture would be launched, perhaps silently even. Just a bit more horse power, very fitting for iPhone OS 2.0. Perhaps with a 32gb option. But still EDGE, no 3G. Then a 32gb version with 3G could be announced in June and become widely available in august.

It’s all over the news: due to budget problems, NASA puts Spirit into hibernation and cuts back on the activity for Opportunity. Where do I sign the protest list?!

One thing I love about Java development is the ease of finding bugs through stack traces. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem that Cocoa likes being so verbose about it, it prefers just giving memory addresses to the function. CocoaDev has a nice article about how to add this that’s based on Apple’s documentation, but it requires /usr/bin/atos that I cannot find in the iPhone SDK. That doesn’t mean it’s not installed, but at this time I have no way of knowing that it is. I have no idea how I should let people beta-test my products and sending automatically back intelligent bug reports without this tool. Ok, I have no idea on how Apple plans to allow for betatesting applications if the AppStore is the only application distribution method, and I have no idea how people do this otherwise as atos(1) isn’t included with the default OS X system either. But I would really, really like to include stack traces with bugreports from beta testers.

Being fairly new to Cocoa I enjoyed reading O’Reilly’s MacDevCenter’s article on exception handling with Cocoa.