Cocoa Developers: While programming with Xcode, I’ve developed several habits to make me a faster programmer. I’ll share these tidbits with you. 1. Use Cmd-Shift-D to quickly open files that you know the names to.... [read more]

Hi Cocoa Developers, Tip of the day: Don’t bind two NSTableView’s to a single NSArrayController instance. Bugs will happen! More specifically, attempting to multi-select rows will not work properly — the two tableviews will fight... [read more]

Hi Programmers. If you are doing drag and drop in an NSTableView with Cocoa, you can use the following method in your “validateDrop” datasource method to retarget the row it is going to: – (void)setDropRow:(int)row... [read more]

In Cocoa, it is pretty easy to use an NSButton that creates a drop down menu. One of the key-tricks to making it appear to be an NSPopUpButton is to set the [NSCell sendActionOn:]. Generally,... [read more]

Today is my one year anniversary at Apple! Apple is a great company, and I have been having a great time working on the AppKit framework and I’m looking forward to all the cool new... [read more]

Hi All. I use synergy to share my keyboard/mouse on my computers. I recompiled the server for Intel MacOS. Feel free to grab it and use it: synergyc_synergys_mac_intel.zip. It is an Intel ONLY binary. It... [read more]

If you haven’t heard, Apple has new laptops, the MacBook Pro. I want one!

It is pretty easy to create a custom Color Picker that is available in any application, or for just your particular app. It isn’t difficult to do, but there are some caveats that you must... [read more]

Hi Apple Cocoa developers. Here are some more tips and tricks for Cocoa development. On Tiger, there is a new class called NSMetadataQuery that allows you to do some cool Spotlight searches. See the “Spotlighter”... [read more]

Apple Cocoa developers: Finally another blog entry for you! Everyone else: You may want to skip this one… It has come to my attention that some NSTableView instances created by dragging CoreData objects into Interface... [read more]

…For today’s software engineering potluck, I made a Pi: Can you tell what is wrong with it? It should be easy, if you are a programmer…or math-y person.

My sister, Brenna, had her 25th birthday yesterday. I got her a new Apple iPod Nano: (note that one is actually mine..)

I’m an ice cream man for Halloween, complete with counter, several flavors of real ice cream, and cones. I gave a bunch of ice cream away at Jason’s party on Saturday night, and I hit... [read more]

One of the great things about WordPress is that you can subscribe to the feed that you are intersted in. For instance, if you just interested in Cocoa stuff, you can just watch this feed.... [read more]

A really cool “hidden” Tiger feature is the ability to quickly see the dictionary for (almost) any word in a Cocoa app. Move the cursor over a word, and press cmd-ctrl-d. You will see the... [read more]

Poking around in Safari’s Contents/Resources folder reveals an HTML page describing the shortcuts: file:///Applications/Safari.app/Contents/Resources/Shortcuts.html Enjoy!

NSOutlineView requires all of the items in it to be pointer unique. If they are not, strange things happen. However, they can be equal (meaning [NSObject isEqual] may return YES). However, there is a small... [read more]

You can utilize some of Xcode’s cool features to become a faster Mac OS X programmer. Here are some things which you may not know: 1. Use Code Completion (Code Sense). However, the default keyboard... [read more]

Safari RSS support is way cool. Except for the fact that after a page has loaded, the search field receives focus, causing the space bar to not scroll down a page at a time. I... [read more]

Another old article: June 20, 2005 Debugging OCTest bundles To debug OCTest bundles: 1. Add a new executable to your Xcode project pointing it to “otest” at /Developer/Tools/otest 2. Double click on the executable, and... [read more]

(The original of this I accidentally killed — here is a copy). If your Cocoa application leaks memory, here is a way to find those leaks! 1) Open your application in Object Alloc 2) Start... [read more]

At WWDC I was asked how to remove the disclosure triangle in an NSOutlineView. Well, first things first. You can change it with this bit of code in your delegate: - (void)outlineView:(NSOutlineView *)ov willDisplayOutlineCell:(NSButtonCell *)cell... [read more]

At WWDC, I quickly mentioned how easy it is to add tooltip’s to an NSCell for an NSTableView/NSOutlineView. Here is a quick snippet of code on how to do this only if the text doesn’t... [read more]

Okay, one of the coolest Tiger enhancements has to do with keyboard shortcuts. The “really smart” Human Interface people at Apple figured out some stuff that bothered me in Panther. The main one that I... [read more]

Mail has a cool way of making unread messages stand out. It is really easy to do this type of thing with NSTableView/NSOutlineView. Subclass the one you want, and override drawRow. Toss in the code... [read more]