July 17th, 2018
Filed under: Cocoa, Mac Development | 5 comments
Back in 2010 I wrote an article on working with file wrappers. Recently I needed to work with file wrappers, and I noticed the file wrapper code is much different in Swift so I figured working with file wrappers in Swift would be a good topic for an article. This article assumes you’re creating a […]
July 11th, 2018
Filed under: Cocoa, Mac Development, Xcode | Be the first to comment!
I ran into an issue with a new document-based Cocoa app throwing exceptions when I tried to save the document. It turns out the issue was the App Sandbox, which is turned on when you create a new Cocoa application project in Xcode. You can see the App Sandbox settings by selecting your project from […]
June 13th, 2018
Filed under: Cocoa, iOS Development, Mac Development, Xcode | Be the first to comment!
One of the most read articles on this blog is An Introduction to Swift Unit Testing. The article is almost four years old and uses Swift 1. Because of that I have decided to build upon that article here, updating the code to Swift 4 and adding an example project to unit test. The Project […]
January 22nd, 2018
Filed under: Cocoa, Mac Development | Be the first to comment!
Checking for modifier keys (Command, Control, Option, and Shift) when handling events is different in Objective-C and Swift. In Objective-C you perform a bitwise AND operation to check if modifier keys were held down. In Swift you check if the event’s modifier flags contains the specific modifier key. The following example demonstrates how to check […]
November 6th, 2017
Filed under: Cocoa, iOS Development, Mac Development | Be the first to comment!
I’m working on a Core Data app where I needed to save some document settings. Creating Core Data entities for these settings was overkill. In my research for a solution I discovered persistent store metadata. I did not find much information online on using persistent store metadata so I’m sharing what I learned in this […]
September 19th, 2017
Filed under: Cocoa, Mac Development, Xcode | Be the first to comment!
Xcode 8.3 removed the Use Storyboards checkbox for new Cocoa application projects. The checkbox has returned in Xcode 9 so you can choose whether to use storyboards or xib files for your project’s user interface.
September 8th, 2017
Filed under: Cocoa, Mac Development | Be the first to comment!
Notifications allow an object of one class to send a message for an object of another class to handle so the two classes don’t have to know about each other. The Cocoa framework has dozens of notifications, but you can also create your own. Using custom notifications involves the following steps: Get the notification center […]
August 7th, 2017
Filed under: Cocoa, Mac Development | 29 comments
I continue my writing on crafting modern Cocoa applications with Swift and storyboards. In this article you’ll learn about building document-based Cocoa applications by developing a simple text editor. I hope this article and project provide a gentle introduction to building document-based Cocoa applications in Swift. If you haven’t read it already, I recommend reading […]
May 30th, 2017
Filed under: Cocoa, Mac Development | Be the first to comment!
This is another post I’m writing as a reference to myself in case I need to deal with this subject in the future. There may be better ways to instantiate views than what I describe here. I’m sharing this information because there’s not much information available on Mac storyboards. Reading the following articles may help […]
March 31st, 2017
Filed under: Cocoa, Mac Development | 3 comments
I’ve noticed there aren’t many articles or tutorials online about writing Mac apps in Swift. To help fill the void I’m writing this tutorial that guides you through the creation of a simple Cocoa app in Swift. The app converts temperatures from Celsius to Fahrenheit. Enter a temperature in Celsius, click a Convert button, and […]