I open-sourced a little bit of, as I’ve been calling it on Twitter, “THE GAME” - that is, the game Em and I’ve been working on: “THIn”: Three easy ways to do things later in Cocoa/Cocoa Touch.

I wrote some key-value observing (KVO) and key-value binding (KVB) helper classes for iOS and Mac OS X. Not much more to say about them than is in the ReadMe file on GitHub. I’m pleased with them. Comments (and pull requests) welcome.

I posted YACYAML, the Cocoa YAML parser/object archiver I’ve been working on for a little while to GitHub today. It converts Cocoa objects to and from YAML, a plain text, human friendly data serialization format.

YACYAML can be used in lots of ways - from replacing plists or JSON for simple config files, up to storing entire custom documents in an easy to view (and easy to hand-edit) format.

Why have I made this?

The short answer is that I like YAML. It’s ‘nicer’ than plists and JSON to edit, and it’s far, far, nicer to look at than NSKeyedArchiver’s binary…

In which a convenient method of using POSIX regular expressions from Objective-C is presented.

It’s a common complaint that the Mac and iPhone platforms don’t have native support for regular expressions, but that’s not entirely true. If you drop down to the UNIX core, there’s an implementation of the old (and only partially busted) POSIX regular expression interfaces. Here, I’ll show a simple Objective-C wrapper class for them that lets you use them conveniently in Mac or iPhone apps.

Before I start, some preemptive remarks: There’s a lot wrong with POSIX regexes to modern eyes. Firstly, and most glaringly, the work …

In which a category allowing the creation of UIImages from Unicode characters, suitable for use as Tab Bar icons, is created, but a state of mild displeasure at the implementation of said category is engendered.

Adding a ‘test’ tab to my in-development iPhone app, I had a dilemma. My troublesome aesthetic sense was telling me that, despite being seen by no-one but me, it needed a good looking icon. My sense of efficiency, though, was telling me “No! Don’t spend the…