Graham Lee says “One of the frequently asked questions regarding my impromptu code-signing talk at NSConference was: how can I share my signing certificate between multiple machines? I’ll show you, but I want to start with a bit of theory. I promise it won’t be too tedious (or it won’t be too long, anyway).”

One of the dirty little secrets of the security industry is that a lot of the techniques in use today are not exactly new, in fact many can be traced back to the classical world. The use of ciphers to encrypt messages was employed by the Roman general, Julius Caesar, and of course the Trojan horse was known about during the time of Homer. Daedalus famously performed a risk assessment on the waxen wings he constructed for himself and Icarus to escape from exile on Crete, but due to user error (and in a neat demonstration of the problem with relying on customers reading security documentation) the wings still suffered from a catastrophic integrity failure.

This post is an expansion upon the post Marcus wrote on March 26, 2009; Core Data: Subclassing NSManagedObject in which he reviewed some best practices on subclassing the NSManagedObject. Based on feedback from that post, here are some additional best practices when working with NSManagedObject subclasses.

It’s now accepted wisdom that no application is an island, and data just wants to be free. So, an important consideration in creating your product is how your users will use it to share. Being able to easily get information out of your application and shared with other people is an important element in your user’s satisfaction. It’s also critically important to your software business. Why? Because word of mouth will be your most important form of marketing and nothing is a better conversation starter than, “How’d you do that?”.

OS X’s API is full of unsung heroes. While everybody knows about Cocoa and Carbon, and is wowed by the new shinies such as Grand Central Dispatch or Core Animation, other components have been silently and solidly plugging away, forming a basic foundation on which the rest of the system can rest. This article is about one such component.