It has troubled me that fonts are such a pain to work with. Why do you have to "install" a font-what makes them so enigmatic that you need to put them in a special centralized directory, and restart your application (or operating system!) just to use it?! Using a font should be as easy as dragging and dropping a graphic into a word processing ( Read more... )

Apple has made a foray into providing what they call a "managed data model" with Core Data. Rather than hand-code classes with instance variables and accessor methods, you design your data structures through entity-relationship modeling. The application framework watches when you change any of this data, and when you do, it knows ( Read more... )

I've often mentioned the idea of changing application programming so more responsibility is offloaded to "The System" (or "The Framework") for managing invalidation. What I'm suggesting isn't quite as pathological as "Completely recompute the layout of every page in Microsoft Word on each keystroke". But I do think that programmers could express ( Read more... )

So given how popular LJ and the Wikis are these days, I'm surprised people aren't building on that for their help systems and having error messages in your program direct you a site. How hard would this be, anyway?

Let's say you start by identifying errors with GUIDs or something like that in your code:

ERR errCannotEditReadOnlyFile ( Read more... )