Welcome back to another Friday Q&A. This week, Quentin Carnicelli (who is heavily involved in generating my paychecks) has suggested that I talk about things that every Apple programmer should know. In other words, common Cocoa design and implementation decisions that I'd prefer Apple not to make.

OpenGL contexts have maximum viewport sizes. If you attempt to exceed the maximum size by, say, calling glViewport() with a size greater than that, you'll get incomplete drawing and weird corruption. This is particularly bad if you're using OpenGL as an interface element in a resizable window. To fix it, call glGetIntegerv(GL_MAX_VIEWPORT_DIMS, dims) to get the max viewport size, then limit your window's size to make sure you never exceed it.

This is probably not so useful to my audience directly, but maybe you can forward it on to people who would find it helpful. I've written my own version of How To Ask Questions, but without gravely insulting anybody who reads it. People who ask questions don't really care about fitting in or conforming or following the rules, they just want answers. This guide tells you how to get answers with a minimum of fuss. And so I present Getting Answers. Any comments you might have on it are most welcome.

If you've done any OpenGL work in Cocoa, you may have noticed that OpenGL surfaces behave badly when it comes to things like miniaturization and deminiaturization to the Dock. This recently caused some big problems for me, and I finally found out how to get rid of these problems altogether. It wasn't excruciatingly hard to find, but I wanted to make a post about it here so that it could be found with words like "deminiaturization".