Distilled, May 8 2014

We've been cranking out Distiller improvements this week, but here are a few things we found interesting:

On the Web

• we announced DIConfiguration, an Objective-C library for per-environment Xcode settings

• Travis blogged about threading macros in Clojure, one of the many tools we use to keep the code that powers Distiller concise and readable

• Cakebrew looks useful for anyone using homebrew to install development tools

NSMeetup

Last night's NSMeetup on Why it's Time to Go Beyond 'MVC' for Cocoa was great to see. It was a very pragmatic take on MVVM, which seems to be coming up more and more in iOS circles these days. Our read of the audience was that ReactiveCocoa (a toolkit often evaluated for providing the bindings in MVVM) seems to be such a paradigm shift for a lot of people that they are struggling to get their heads around it. Seeing an MVVM implementation broken down into smaller steps using more familiar pieces probably helped some of those folks see the value.

Also, shout out to whoever put up their hand and admitted to having a UIViewController with 4200+ lines of code.

More generally, if you're an iOS (or OSX) developer in the Bay Area and you're not attending NSMeetup, you're missing out and probably reinventing a wheel here or there. The subjects are thought-provoking and the people that attend have lots of experiences to share.