Details matter, but they are getting lost. At Apple I worked on the main User Interface (UI) framework called AppKit for about 13 years. I would help enforce UI consistency in applications by logging bugs... [read more]

I’ve been brewing beer for the past few years, and it is a lot of fun. As a programmer, I want to play around with code to track data. One of the things that frustrated... [read more]

Quick Summary If you add a Swift property to an NSTextFieldCell subclass and you may suddenly start getting random crashes! Implement an override of [NSCell copyWithZone:] that retains any properties to fix this: Gory Details... [read more]

You find a bug in macOS or iOS. Something in the software isn’t working the way it should work. You decide to let Apple know, and head over to http://bugreport.apple.com and login with your Apple ID.... [read more]

Part 1 discussed why you should not be doing code reviews. Part 2: When to do code reviews and how to not do them. If you are creating mission critical code, then by all means: have... [read more]

You probably don’t need to be doing code reviews. Have confidence in the code you write, and understand it well. Click through to read all the details on why.

I’ve been using the Adafruit LE friend to do some data transfer tests. With the basic setup, I was sending 1 kB of data in about 9.5 to 10 seconds. That is horribly slow! About... [read more]

For the past 10 years I’ve given a talk at every Apple World Wild Developer Conference (WWDC). Well, except for one. That was 2007 when I was busy working on UIKit for the iPhone 1.0.... [read more]

For my “Cyr Wheel Pattern Editor” app I am using CoreData and an NSTableView. However, I’m sort of “manually” doing bindings for the array content itself to get animations in the View Based NSTableView. Here’s... [read more]

Sometimes you may find your application has rather complex rows, and you want an NSViewController to manage each row in a “View Based” NSTableView. This is fairly easy to do, and I did it in... [read more]

I have a little home-brew Cocoa app for making Cyr Wheel patterns. The UI is built with an NSTableView and looks like this: Now normally when you try to directly click on one of the... [read more]

I’ve seen many ways to implement delete in an NSTableView. Many are good. Many hardcode references to something they shouldn’t, and those are bad. Here’s an easy way: Subclass NSTableView and override keyDown: - (void)keyDown:(NSEvent... [read more]

I think I’ll do a few articles on why certain API was introduced in Leopard. I’ll start with one of the new methods in NSTableView: /* Returns the fully prepared cell that the view will... [read more]

[Edit: ecto ate this post, so I’m typing it in again!] I discovered that a lot of applications will unnecessarily write to NSUserDefaults. This causes your app to hit the disk when it shouldn’t, and... [read more]

One of the most annoying dialogs in Xcode is the undo warning dialog you get when attempting to undo after a save. I do this all the time, and I hate the warning. Luckily, there... [read more]

…..drumroll please…and it is…is: objc_exception_throw. You should always have this breakpoint setup in any Cocoa or Cocoa Touch app that you are building. How do you do it? In Xcode, Run -> Show -> Breakpoints... [read more]

How can you become a faster Cocoa programmer? One way is to adequately name your variables, enums and classes. Let’s start with enums and take an example from something new to NSTableView in Leopard. This... [read more]

WWDC 2008! Howdy to my fellow Cocoa Developers. Take a look at the conference schedule: http://developer.apple.com/wwdc/schedules/ and be sure to come to my talk! Tuesday at 10:30 AM, iPhone for Mac Developers. If you have... [read more]

Mac OS 10.5 added a “source list” highlighting style to NSTableView, with the API below for your reference: enum { NSTableViewSelectionHighlightStyleRegular = 0, NSTableViewSelectionHighlightStyleSourceList = 1, }; typedef NSInteger NSTableViewSelectionHighlightStyle; – (NSTableViewSelectionHighlightStyle)selectionHighlightStyle; – (void)setSelectionHighlightStyle:(NSTableViewSelectionHighlightStyle)selectionHighlightStyle; Source... [read more]

It recently came up where someone needed to override some of the default shortcut keys in the NSOpenPanel or NSSavePanel. This is quite trivial to do. First off, the “easy way” would be to add... [read more]

PhotoSearch, a demo app I wrote for WWDC a few years ago, is now live: http://developer.apple.com/samplecode/PhotoSearch/ It demonstrates some cool custom cell stuff that is only available on Leopard.

Update: Sept 9, 2009: Mac OS 10.6 Snow Leopard now has this feature built into Instruments! In Xcode, choose “Run -> Run with Performance Tool -> Zombies”, and repeat your steps that cause the crash.... [read more]

Leopard, the new Mac OS 10.5, is out! There are a lot of new features, but not everything is mentioned on the features page. Here are some of the cool “power user” features which you... [read more]

Hi Cocoa Programmers, There is a small bug in NSBrowser if you use bindings and want a custom cell class. Typically, you would do something like this in your awakeFromNib: - (void)awakeFromNib { [iBrowser setCellClass:[ImageTextBrowserCell... [read more]

It might be nice to note a few Xcode debugging things that I tend to do. Frequently, I’ll want to break on a specific symbol, like -[NSException raise] Well, there are several ways to do... [read more]

Mac OS X has some GREAT keyboard access. One spectacular thing is the ability to access all items (unlike windows, where you have to have a defined shortcut for each item, and you easily run... [read more]

Inside of Xcode, I’ll want to quickly go to a method implementation. If you hit Cmd-F and do a find for the method name (or the start of it), you will frequently get hits for... [read more]

A note to NSOutlineView Cocoa programmers: It has never been safe to call reloadData while an outlineView is doing a reloadData. What the heck does that mean? Well, if you call reloadData, a whole bunch... [read more]

Come to WWDC this year! I’ll be giving a great talk on advanced control and cell creation with Cocoa: 120 Beyond Buttons and Sliders: Complex Controls in Cocoa Learn how you can quickly and efficiently... [read more]

Hi all, I’ve seen some people request how to do a modal color panel. Well, carbon has GetColor(..) which ultimately uses the same NSColorPanel. So, you can set it to begin a modal session before... [read more]