Mar 11 2018
macOS 10.12 (I will update this post once I’ve moved to 10.13) UTIs are necessary for – creating/setting filetypes for a document-based app (whether using NSDocument or not) – telling the system which filetypes your apps will open On macOS, you’re more likely to encounter UTIs in the both context; the importing of files (eg […]
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 […]
Feb 13 2018
Once you start looking into what file creation and reading involves, you may feel an urge to run away screaming. I certainly did. So far, I have managed to write posts on – NSOpenPanel/NSSavePanel – Basic FileManager paths/URLs – custom file types – Codable/NSCoding These posts do not touch on – file coordinators and -presenters […]
Feb 7 2018
macOS 10.12; Swift 4 Basics Opening and saving files is part of many, if not most Mac Apps, and there are many ways of achieving this. I wanted to review my practice and hope to arrive at a clean, swifty way of file handling. In this post, I will concentrate on NSOpenPanel and NSSavePanel, rather […]
Feb 7 2018
macOS 10.12; Swift 4 This post started as an offshoot of the NSOpenPanel/NSSavePanel post. Frequently I want to navigate to certain locations – eg, my apps ApplicationSupport folder, or the user’s document folder – and I could never remember how to get to them. (Spoiler: I think this API has been updated a lot since […]
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 […]
Jan 5 2018
macOS 10.12, Xcode 9.2 In the macOS Storyboard Segues post I briefly referred to embed segues; I have just used one and found an ideosynchracy that is worth documenting. At the moment, about 100% of bugs (as opposed to cases I didn’t handle or things I forgot to set up) are due to storyboard issues: […]
Dec 29 2017
Edited to add: This, apparently, works as intended – you need to assign the button’s _target_ with testButton.target = self. It doesn’t completely explain why the code is working under some circumstances, but it’s not a bug as such. This thoroughly spoilt my day today. I was convinced I’d gotten the ‘assign-an-action-on-the-fly’ code correctly, but […]
Dec 27 2017
macOS 10.12, Xcode 9.2 Do not use the name of a viewController subclass as your Storyboard ID. I’ve had both ‘Storyboard […] doesn’t contain a controller with identifier ‘MyCustomController’ and the cast to MyCustomController failing randomly; in one instance a cast to NSViewController worked, but MyCustomController did not. When I set the identifier to “CustomVC” […]
Mar 13 2018
Bugfixing: an example from Topology
This is a lovely, and lovingly details explanation of how a rare bug was identified, what steps were taken to isolate it, and how it was finally resolved. Debugging is a skillset of its own, and this article walks you through the process. https://topologyeyewear.github.io/engineering-blog/2018/03/07/heap_corruption/ (warning: the main blog autoplays _something_ and doesn’t stop, so enter […]
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