31st January 2010 / 1 comment
The first day of NSConference 2010 kicked off with two workshops – Concurrency Programming on Snow Leopard by Drew McCormack, and The World According to Gemmell, by the Legend himself, of which I was an attendee.
The session started with a discussion about a certain recently released Apple product which was very interesting and allowed us to present our thoughts on …
30th January 2010 / 2 comments
We’ve all seen it before: dialogs which ask you whether you are absolutely, completely, invariably sure that you want to close without saving changes. And you click “Yes” in your haste, and then realise that you actually kind of needed that unsaved presentation that you’d been working on all evening.
A flawed design
It’s a pretty common design in applications even today, …
22nd January 2010 / no comments
The NSUserDefaults class provides Cocoa applications access to the underlying Mac OS X defaults system, and can be used to store and persist user preferences.
Whilst providing an interface to the defaults system, the NSUserDefaults class can also be used to access command line arguments that were passed when the executable was launched, which have already been parsed and are accessed …
16th January 2010 / no comments
Source Lists feature in many Mac OS X applications. From iTunes to iCal to Versions, they are a great navigation control.
But for us Cocoa developers, they aren’t that easy to implement. You can easily create an NSOutlineView and set its highlight mode to “Source List” but none of the other Source List features come built in out of the box, …
12th January 2010 / no comments
Interface Builder is one of Apple’s developer tools, used to design interfaces for both Mac OS X and iPhone applications, and in most instances saves developers huge amounts of time from having to write the equivalent code, whilst also providing a useful visual representation of the interfaces they are working on.
Some developers try and fight Interface Builder, and would rather …