IRC development rooms can be funky places; sometimes people approach you with unusual questions that make you think for a bit before you realize the answer might help other developers. Take the other evening, for instance, when someone asked me whether there was an easy way to manage a table data source that could not extend beyond a certain number of cells.

The developer asynchronously downloaded new items and wanted to append these to his data without going past a maximum count for an array. Normally, I'd recommend that he use an NSMutableArray as a queue, but then he pointed out one small issue: he could not guarantee whether the array would be fully populated when adding those new items.

A queue doesn't know much about delaying pops. Whereas a queue takes two operators:push and pull, regardless of its contents, my class needed to use just one: push, returning the head object only when it had filled its capacity. Yes, you can emulate this with a queue by adding a lot of code checking for its size, capacity, etc but there had to be a simpler solution.

Now, seriously, I spent a good deal of time googling for data types and I could not for the life of me remember what a structure like this is called so I am going to be calling it a "data tube". It's not a ring buffer. It's not a blocking queue. It's...a...whatever. 

To create my DataTube, I initially subclassed NSMutableArray until I quickly remembered that you cannot inherit array-ness (to coin a word), but you can create a class that contains one. Instead, I built a simple abstract class that contained a size and an array. The size variable limits the width of the tube. The array stores, as you'd expect, the mutable array.

Under the new clang extensions, you can now address the tube directly, e.g. NSLog(@"%@", tube[2])

To make the tube work, each object must pass through the tube before it's pulled out in a FIFO manner. To use this class, initialize it, set its size, and then push items onto it. You can set it to reverse the order for objectAtIndex: so your table goes either newest to oldest or vice versa.