Mac OS X 10.5.7 has shipped and includes a fix for the NSOperationQueue bug that I discovered late last year. I have run all of my old test cases against 10.5.7 and it appears to perform as advertised. As far as I can see, NSOperationQueue is now safe to use. I'm glad that my prediction of no fix until Snow Leopard turned out to be wrong. Enjoy!

Welcome back to Friday Q&A, which this week is also Friday the Thirteenth! Be especially careful, as this is the first of two consecutive Friday the Thirteenths. For this first Friday the Thirteenth I'm going to talk about parallel software design using an "operations" approach (think NSOperation), as suggested by Nikita Zhuk way back when I first started this whole thing.

I've done another appearance on Late Night Cocoa, this time discussing NSOperationQueue problems. Check it out over at The Mac Developer Network.

The other day I posted about how NSOperationQueue is broken and can't be used. At Rogue Amoeba we liked the API so much we decided to create a non-broken version, so we've released RAOperationQueue. It's not a 100% replacement, as it has some significant limitations (and some benefits) compared to NSOperationQueue, but we've found it to be very useful. For more information, click the link above.

I've been discussing this on cocoa-dev but wanted to make a separate post about it to get the word out further. NSOperationQueue is broken on Leopard and will cause crashes. Don't use it!