Objective-C concurrency issues

Disclaimer - I've not shipped Java Swing / SWT apps. I'm a server guy where markup is the UI. Consequently, I don't have in-depth knowledge of Java to compare against. I'm aware of SwingUtilities.invokeLater(Runnable) but otherwise just assume I'm clueless about Swing.

First rule of GUI programming - don't block the main thread.

Second rule of GUI programming - don't block the main thread, etc.

Quantifying this, you have a device running at a refresh rate of 60Hz. So you if you do anything in the main thread, you need it to complete in under 16ms, or your UI will not be smooth and responsive.

In Java, I would normally look at Executors, Callables, Runnables and related APIs to do things off the main thread. In Objective-C, we have NSOperationQueue and NSOperation. Learn, use and love them. In particular, don't do what I did and start porting java.util.concurrent classes to Objective-C. I wrote a CountdownLatch, which was very nice and taught me about various low-level concurrency primitives. Unfortunately it was completely the wrong solution for the language. What I should have done was to use [NSOperation addDependency:] to chain tasks together.