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Just got back from a weekend at CocoaConf down in Herndon VA. A lot of great sessions from Ranch folks, and from everyone else as well. One of my favorites was the session Chad Sellers from Useful Fruit had on Text, covering the text system from NSString up through NSTextView and back down to Core Text. I learned stuff.

The switch statement is an indubitable strength of the Swift language. Behind the switch statement is Swift’s pattern-matching, which makes for more readable, safer code. It is possible to take the switch’s pattern-matching readability and power and apply it elsewhere in your code.

Thinking of migrating your iOS or macOS app from a bunch of `NSLog` or `print` statements to the new(ish) Unified Logging system? Read this for some facts and tidbits that might surprise you, along with a few suggestions for how to make the most of your transition.

_TL;DR: When to use isEqual: or isEqualToString:? There’s no meaningful performance difference between the two. For convenience use isEqual:. For a modicum of type safety use isEqualToString:, but it’s not as safe as you might believe. If you have unicode strings with different normalizations, use compare:. Be careful if nils are involved.
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When an app requires full-text search developers usually have two major contenders to choose from: Solr and ElasticSearch. Each addresses different use cases, but generally, ElasticSearch performs noticeably better when an app expects frequent reindexing, as is often the case. Gems like Tire make setting up ElasticSearch a breeze, but setting up more advanced indexes and interfacing with ActiveRecord can sometimes be a pain. Read on to see how to make your life easier with ElasticSearch and Tire.

Cocoa has a number of classes that can hold arbitrary amounts of Stuff. Things like arrays, dictionaries, sets, index sets, character sets, strings, data, strings, and so on. These classes come in two flavors, mutable and immutable.

Fast Enumeration, part 1 covered what fast enumeration is. Part 2 covered the method countByEnumeratingState, which is the centerpiece of fast enumeration. This time around there’s actual code which implements a collection that can be fast enumerated, without cheating and falling back on one of Apple’s collections.

You can find all sorts of interesting and useful stuff in Apple’s header files. Don’t be afraid to explore them. I usually troll through the headers when a new major SDK version comes out (like IOS 7 probably will be this year) to see what’s new. I also use them for API exploration. As always, when in doubt be sure to read the official documentation. Apple’s documentation is good. It’s also voluminous. But once you’ve marinated in a framework for awhile, you know how things work and might only need a refresher or a nudge in the right direction. These days I usually spelunk in the headers, and then hit the docs if I’m not sure what the headers are trying to tell me.