Single-issue posts dealing with a particular class or problem.
Jan 28 2019
Xcode 10, Swift 4.2, macOS 10.13 func fileModificationDate(url: URL) -> Date? { do { let attr = try FileManager.default.attributesOfItem(atPath: url.path) return attr[FileAttributeKey.modificationDate] as? Date } catch { return nil } } FileAttributeKey.creationDate works exactly the same; .size and .type might also be of interest. This beautiful and elegant solution comes from this Stackoverflow answer and […]
Jan 13 2019
Xcode 10, macOS 13.5, Swift 4.2 Without wanting to delve too deep into the NSDocumentController class: It’s part of the document architecture, and if your app uses more than one NSDocument subclass, you will need to override the following method: override func makeUntitledDocument(ofType typeName: String) throws -> NSDocument { switch typeName { case “ThingB”: return […]
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 […]
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 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 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: […]
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 […]
Mar 29 2020
Saving a font to UserDefaults
(Here using macOS 13, Xcode 10, Swift 4.2, but NSFontDescriptor also exists on iOS, just substitute UIFont). The recommended way of saving a font is not to do it (a bit flippant, sorry) – but in WWDC session 223 from 2013 (Using Fonts with TextKit), the recommendation is specifically to a) not cherry-pick attributes (in […]
By Extelligent Cocoa • Interface, Wiki • • Tags: NSFont, NSFontDescriptor, NSTextField, UserDefaults