For a few releases the Apple development tools have included OCUnit and many developers have now started to write unit tests. There are lots of tutorials that explain how this is done for the straight-forward cases but there’s one area of testing that has proven difficult on most platforms, and that is testing of the user interface. That said, there are a few things that make this an easier problem to solve with Cocoa and in this post I’ll explain why.

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Another major improvement of OCMock: it now supports more flexible constraints on the expected arguments. This is done in the Objective-C way and user-defined constraints don’t have to implement a formal interface, they’re just methods in the test class. As usual this release also includes several contributions from the community. More details on the OCMock page at Mulle Kybernetik.

Of the many projects I have worked on the rewrite of the Guardian website is certainly a highlight. And in this case I can even speak about it in detail. In fact, Mat Wall from the Guardian and I presented some of our experiences at several conferences, and now the Software Engineering Radio has published a podcast in which we talk about this project.

It has been in the making for some time but now the ThoughtWorks Anthology is available from the Pragmatic Programmers. The Anthology is a collection of essays written by individual authors from ThoughtWorks covering a wide range of topics that we encounter on our projects. My essay finally gets our thinking on Domain Annotations into writing, after we had presented the ideas at a couple of conferences. A more in-depth description of the Anthology can be found on the Pragmatic Bookshelf.

Working with CruiseControl I’ve always found CCTray a really useful tool… for Windows. Being a Mac user I decided we really need something like this for the Mac and started working on CCMenu this summer. After a few beta releases this has reached version 1.0 yesterday. Check it out here.