Season's Greetings, NSHipsters!
As the year winds down, and we take a moment to reflect on our experiences over the past months, one thing is clear: 2014 has been an incredible year professionally for Apple developers. So much has happened in such a short timespan, and yet it's hard to remember our relationship to Objective-C before Swift, or what APIs could have captivated our imagination as much as iOS 8 or WatchKit.
It's an NSHipster tradition to ask you, dear readers, to send in your favorite tips and tricks from the past year for publication over the New Year's holiday. This year, with the deluge of new developments—both from Cupertino and the community at large—there should be no shortage of interesting tidbits to share.
Submit your favorite piece of Swift or Objective-C trivia, framework arcana, hidden Xcode feature, or anything else you think is cool, and you could have it featured in the year-end blowout article. Just comment on this gist below!
If you're wondering about what to post, look to past year's write-ups for inspiration (2014, 2013).
I can't wait to see what you all send in!
For reverse engineering purpose, it’s always useful to look at instance variables of objects. It’s usually pretty easy to do so with
valueForKey:
since very few classes override the +accessInstanceVariablesDirectlymethod to disable ivar acces through Key-Value Coding.
There’s one case where it doesn’t work though: when the ivar has a
void *
type. Here is an excerpt of the MediaPlayer framework class-dump on iOS 6.1:Since
id internal = [moviePlayerController valueForKey:@"internal"]
doesn’t work, here is the hardcore way to access theinternal
ivar:Don’t ship this code, its’s very fragile because the ivar layout may change. Use this for reverse engineering only!