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” […]
Nov 22 2017
(Xcode 9, Swift 4, macOS 10.12) I’ve been working with the Cocoa framework on MacOS, on and off, since 2006. That’s more than ten years. Taking a value from a text field is one of the first exercises you learn when you first explore programming… and it wasn’t until I poked at Apple’s introductory iOS […]
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 […]
Nov 7 2017
In Swift, functions are first class citizens The above does not come as a surprise. We’re using closures as callback handlers, and store them – frequently as optionals – save them, pass them around. I’ve used them as a variable in an enum: depending on the value of the enum, I return a different closure. […]
Oct 28 2017
The other day I had what I thought a very simple request: I wanted to replace one viewcontroller with another in the same window. This is something that on iOS (particularly iPhones) happens all the time; but somewhat to my suprise, macOS does not have an obvious out-of-the-box solution for this. This turns out to […]
Jul 16 2017
Xcode 9b/Swift 4/macOS 10.12 (This tutorial has been updated and tested under Xcode 9 since the previous instructions no longer worked to create new projects, which is exactly the same problem I had going from 7 to 8/10.10 to 10.11. I currently have one project that will compile and run under Xcode 8, but crash […]
Feb 7 2018
Basic Filemanager paths/URLs
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 […]
By Extelligent Cocoa • File Handling, Wiki •