May 12 2018
(Xcode 9, macOS 10.12, Swift 4) Stackviews exist mainly to make layout easier (we’ll not go much into NSGridView here, which is the ‘we found another use case for which stackViews aren’t all that great’ variant). In this post, we’ll see what else we can do with stackviews, and where the pitfalls are. I find […]
Feb 27 2018
macOS 10.12.6; Xcode 9.2; Swift 4.0 This is the basic ‘create a file’ post; you still need to register your filetype with the Finder and tell your app what it means to open a file when the user double-clicks it in the Finder; there is a separate post on Filetypes and UTIs which builds on […]
Jan 27 2018
Toolbars have been an integral part of macOS since the beginning. They provide the opportunity to display frequently used controls to the user. Where older macOS applications might have presented a pallet with certain options, modern macOS apps tend to use toolbars. While Apple provides an extensive guide for macOS toolbars, it was last updated […]
Nov 9 2017
macOS 10.12, Xcode 9, Swift 4 In my post on macOS Storyboard Segues I said I’d look at sheets in more details, and now is as good a time as any. I meant to look at sheet segues in this post, but then I worked through all of the permutations of NSAlert, and 3500 words […]
Jan 15 2017
Xcode 8, macOS 10.12, Swift 3.0 In Part 1 of this tutorial, we created an outlineView that, thanks to a SourceListItem protocol, was indefinitely flexible: you can have different classes on several levels, or indefinite levels (though it is probably wise to limit this programatically so you don’t nest too deep. It all depends on […]
Jan 4 2017
Xcode 8.0, macOS 10.11 (This is Part 1 of 3; in which we will create an NSOutlineView with a flexible data structure that can be used for simple trees and for structures like the one below which contain a number of different, unrelated items. Part 2 will deal with inserting and deleting items, and reacting […]
Jan 4 2017
(OSX 10.11, Xcode 8) Create a new app: drop an NSImageView and two buttons into the storyboard, set up an outlet for the image view and two actions – zoomIn and zoomOut for the buttons. 0) Not recommended: scaleUnitSquare @IBAction func zoomOut(_ sender: AnyObject) { imageView.scaleUnitSquare(to: NSSize(width: 0.4, height: 0.4)) } This works perfectly fine. […]
Dec 6 2016
(This post is based on https://www.raywenderlich.com/98178/os-x-tutorial-menus-popovers-menu-bar-apps), expanded and updated for Swift 3. This seems to be the only tutorial in town – at least I’ve seen a couple of other tutorials that were suspiciously similar, right down to the architecture and the location of the event monitoring code.) Xcode 8.0, macOS 10.11 1) Start simple: […]
Sep 15 2019
Disclosure Triangle (Autolayout)
(Xcode 10, Swift 4.2, macOS 13.6) This is a common use case: users who just want an overview get a smaller window with the most important content, users who want more detail can click a triangular button and more details unfold. I seem to have tackled this problem several times without feeling completely happy with […]
By Extelligent Cocoa • Application Design, Bug Reports, Interface, Tutorials • • Tags: Autolayout, disclosure, embed view