Stack Overflow Apple iOS development community

Welcome to Stack Overflow Apple iOS Application Development Chat Room.

1. What type of questions can i ask?

1. Questions related to Apple iOS/Mac application development, the Objective-C language, to Cocoa frameworks etc. Since it's a chat room after all, friendly chat is always welcome - but should not be very off topic, should not cause any trouble to any ongoing technical discussions

2. What are the best practices to ask questions?

1. You'd better be ready to answer the question - What have you tried?

2. Here's a good guide to Getting Answers.

3. Use Pastebin, Gist, ideone to show your code. For couple of lines of code, it's okay to just post them in the chat room itself. Long blocks of code lose their indentation and they are hard to read.

4. Don't ask if you can ask a question - just ask the question. You don't need to direct your question at a particular person.

5. Give people a chance to answer your question. Don't repeatedly ping for a response. This is a chat room - and people are doing other things apart from participating in it.

6. Don't be a Help Vampire. You are not helping yourself. See the above points and ask better questions.

7. Don't enable Help Vampires. You are only encouraging them and reducing the signal to noise ratio in the chat room.

8. Please avoid using text speak. Use 'you' not 'u', 'how are you?' not 'hru'. You're sat at a keyboard and you have a large allowance for the size of your message.

3. What is the /dev/null room? Why have my messages been moved there?

1. The /dev/null room is a bit-bucket. The sin-bin, the message dump. If the room owners find messages in this chat room that they consider off-topic or out of the room's scope then those messages will be moved there.

2. Friendly chat is allowed. Some off-topic conversations are allowed. This is a chat room after all, it's not all about the work. But, if you just come in here to chat, or troll, don't be surprised if your messages get moved to /dev/null/.

3. Is iOS better than Android? That question doesn't have an objective answer. Trying to discuss it in this chat room is considered off-topic and those messages will be moved to /dev/null/.

4. Pestering people with the same question is annoying. If you've asked a question and you aren't getting a reply, then pinging individuals with the same question is annoying. Those messages will be moved to /dev/null. Be warned. Some of the room owners have time and a vicious streak a mile wide. If they find that someone is just being annoying or mis-using the room then their messages will be moved to /dev/null. Messages that engage with or enable trollish behaviour will also be moved to /dev/null.

5. Ignore the Trolls. This is a busy room that has been active for a long time. Part of the reason that it is so long lived is because it is an open room. You don't need permission to access the room, and there are usually people around willing to help with problems. Because it is busy and open this room attracts Trolls. Please do not engage with them. The common phrase is "Do Not Feed The Troll". Trolls thrive on attention. Trolls thrive on feeling that they are singled out. Trolls don't do very well when people ignore them. The SO chat room has a facility where you can ignore messages from certain users. Click on their image and it is the last menu option. Their posts and pings will not show up in your timeline.

4. How do I participate in this room?

chat faqs can be found here.

5. What are some good iOS/Objective-C Development resources?

1. Starting Developing iOS Apps Today

2. Cocoa Coding Guidelines

3. Cocoa Core Competencies

4. Cocoa Application Competencies for iOS

5. Understanding and Analyzing Crash Reports

6. Drawing With Quartz on iOS. A handy slide-deck.

7. Apple Development Videos.

8. Transitioning to ARC

9. Automatic Reference Counting

10. Apple Developer Guides

11. iOS Debugging Magic

12.When to use retainCount

6. Are there any blogs that I would find interesting?

1. Cocoa with Love.

2. Cocoa Is My Girlfriend

3. Mikeash Friday Q & A

4. Cocoa Samurai

5. bbum's weblog-o-mat

6. Ridiculous Fish

7. Bill Dudney's blog

8. Chris Hanson's blog

9. Cocoanetics

10. 0xced

11. Hamster Emporium

12. boredzo

13. Objectivist-C

14. fun with objective-c

15. Landon Fuller

16. Ole Begemann

17. Borkware Miniblog

18. Random Ideas - From the Mind of Jiva

19. Uli Kusterer

20. Dave Dribin's Blog

21. Chris Parker's Blog

22. Robert Brown's Blog

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