I don’t intend for this to become a link blog–not because of some high-falutin’ ideals, but because I assume most potential readers are at least as connected into the Mac dev community as I am and will have already heard the latest cool news.

But the latest post by Glen Aspeslagh describes Ecamm Network’s usage of a project which seems to deserve increased exposure: Cocotron, “an open source project which aims to implement a cross-platform Objective-C API similar to that described by Apple Inc.’s Cocoa documentation.” Or, as glibly summarized by the Ecammeratus: “Wrote a Cocoa app? Just add a new Xcode target, hit compile and out shoots a Windows version.”

Sure, it doesn’t work perfectly, but Glen’s warts-and-all description sounds promising. If you have a product that could benefit from a Windows equivalent please give Cocotron a look and contribute code–so it will be easier for me to use when I come up with a product that could benefit from it.

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This is one of those cool little tidbits I learned during a WWDC session and can share now that Xcode 3.1 is out: Xcode 3.1 has changed the way you should add Apple-supplied frameworks. Although Apple claims in the Release Notes (you have read them, haven’t you?) that the process has been “simplified,” the method isn’t really apparent from within Xcode.
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The standard Cocoa method for a string with multiple replacements is [NSString stringWithFormat:]. To build a standard analogy string from the SATs:

	hand : palm :: foot : sole

you would break out each of the replaceable elements into separate strings and replace them in the format string with the placeholder ‘%@’. (There are many other format specifiers–look up printf()–but ‘%@’ is very common in Cocoa since it specifies an Objective-C object, not just a simple number or C null-terminated string.)

	NSString * format = @"%@ : %@ :: %@ : %@";

To create the desired string:

	NSString * myString =
	   [NSString stringWithFormat:format,
	                              @"hand",
	                              @"palm",
	                              @"foot",
	                              @"sole",
	                              nil];

If you want to create a different analogy string, just call stringWithFormat: again, using the same format string but different parameters following it.

The stringWithFormat: method takes a list of objects, and the nil parameter indicates the end of the list. If you want to manage the list of substitution parameters, though, you shouldn’t need that nil since NSArray knows how many elements it contains. Unfortunately, there isn’t a method like stringWithFormat: which takes an NSArray instead of a list of objects; there also doesn’t seem to be a simple way to convert the contents of an NSArray to a nil-terminated parameter list.

How then can you make this templating more dynamic at runtime by storing the list in an NSArray?

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