Shiny Things » Cocoa

NSHTTPCookieOriginURL is broken on iOS :(

agrant — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 04:59:08 +0000

A quick tip that might save someone a good few hours of bug hunting:

Under iOS it seems that when creating cookies via [NSHTTPCookie cookieWithProperties] that using NSHTTPCookieOriginURL will cause creation to fail. Instead you should pass the URL as two parts using CookieDomain and CookiePath.

E.g this will silently fail:

[[NSHTTPCookieStorage sharedHTTPCookieStorage] setCookie:
[NSHTTPCookie cookieWithProperties:
[NSDictionary dictionaryWithObjectsAndKeys:
@"Name", NSHTTPCookieName,
@"Value", NSHTTPCookieValue,
referringUrl, NSHTTPCookieOriginURL,
nil
]
]
];

But this will work (referringUrl is an NSURL such as http://example.com/foo/bar)

NSHTTPCookie* cookie = [NSHTTPCookie cookieWithProperties:
[NSDictionary dictionaryWithObjectsAndKeys:
@"Name", NSHTTPCookieName,
@"Value", NSHTTPCookieValue,
[referringUrl host], NSHTTPCookieDomain,
[referringUrl path], NSHTTPCookiePath,
nil
]
];
CBD_ASSERT(cookie);
[[NSHTTPCookieStorage sharedHTTPCookieStorage] setCookie:cookie];

And you can see, this time there’s a handy assert to catch any problems early on. Sometimes it pays to break your code into multiple statements even when not strictly necessary.

The Best iPhone Programming Book

agrant — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 01:21:04 +0000

Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X (3rd Edition)

Due to the stringent SDK NDA there are no "Programming for the iPhone" type books currently available. However that are still plenty of books that can teach you how to program the iPhone.

Because the iPhone SDK is built upon the Cocoa foundation framework, and the iPhone UIKit framework is heavily influenced by the regular OSX AppKit, many of the same principles apply. In addition the tools used to create regular Mac apps are the same as used for the iPhone.

If you want a book that offers a quick way to get up to speed on the iPhone, and that serves as a great reference to both Objective-C and Cocoa, then look no further. This book’s extremely readable and you can pickup a lot without writing every sample. Being new to XCode / Interface Builder I also found some of the workflow tips to be extremely helpful. Single-pane all the way!

This book definitely helped me get to grips with Objective-C / Cocoa (some areas of which I still find just odd, but more on those later). If/when the NDA restrictions are lifted I wouldn’t be surprised if this is still a better starting guide for iPhone programming than some of the dedicated books.