Last week, I wrote about the Help menu bug that seems to “freeze” apps inasmuch as it makes them not handle any keyboard input.

The thing is, I cannot always reproduce this issue. I rebooted my system and just couldn’t break the behavior anymore. Which sounds an awful lot like running the system for a while and using it in a specific way might affect the Help menu’s behavior. But I don’t know which steps you need to take to reproduce this. It’s puzzling me. With Daniel Jalkut and a beta tester of my latest app having experienced the same issue, I know I’m not alone. Or crazy. Just clueless.

If you run macOS 10.13 High Sierra, try not to use the Help menu. It will appear to freeze the app for which you invoke the Help menu: it will not accept keyboard input anymore, emitting the NSBeep “invalid action” sound in most circumstances.

The reason seems to be that the nifty Search bar inside the Help menu will acquire focus so you can search for a menu item or help book entry. This is taking away focus from the app window. You notice this when the blue focus ring around an active text field in the window goes away; instead, the Help menu’s Search bar obtains focus and the accompanying blue focus ring. All this is supposed to happen. This process just isn’t reverted for some reason since at least macOS 10.13.3, maybe earlier. When you click back into the app outside of the Help menu, the key window status will not be assigned back to the window you click on. That means keyboard input will not work at all. (As a non-native English speaker, I asked if “key window” was supposed to mean “window that responds to key events” a while back. While people agreed this wasn’t the intention, I still cannot help to think that way. The app has no key window, so key events are not handled, resulting in NSBeep.)

You can fix this inconsistent state yourself: open the Help menu again, then hover over an adjacent main menu entry, like “Window”. This will apparently close the Help menu in a different, proper way, unlike clicking back inside the main app’s window. Restarting the app works too. Cmd-tabbing out and back in does not help, though. (Backstage info: the Help menu will send willOpen when you tab back into the app, re-acquiring key status while not being on screen.)

I filed a bug report with Apple. See rdar://39374865 and make sure to clone the report so this is fixed sooner than later.

That’s a bad problem. As an app developer, your app will appear broken, so you need to fix this for your users even though it’s an Apple bug.

A working fix is to assign a NSMenuDelegate to the Help main menu item’s submenu (which consider to “be” the Help menu) and restore key status in the app. This is a pretty simple brute-force solution:

extension AppDelegate: NSMenuDelegate {
    func menuDidClose(_ menu: NSMenu) {
        if menu === NSApp.helpMenu {
            // Replace with more elaborate restoration:
            NSApp.mainWindow?.makeKey()
        }
    }
}

Setting the key window this way might actually result in a second menuDidClose(_:) call (after another menuDidOpen, by the way, which is odd).

Also, I found the window needs a reason to redraw afterwards to draw the blue focus ring where it belongs. Your app will forward key events to the current responder as expected, but if the firstResponder is a text field, the blue ring will not be visible immediately. I can live with this for now.

Also, I have yet to find out how multi-window apps or NSDocument-based apps behave. Is the right window restored? Do you want the mainWindow to become key? I’ll experiment with TableFlip and see what happens.

Today, Daniel Jalkut wrote about this, too, with a more elaborate approach to restore the actual state before the help menu was invoked.

I use the macOS color well to let users of The Archive tint vector icons in their favorite color. But setting NSColorWell.isEnabled hardly produces a visual change in the color editor.

Can you easily tell which is enabled and which is disabled if it weren’t for the checkbox?

The little frame color change is too subtle for my taste. I added a high-contrast strike-through line to my color well:

Enjoy the code below:

class StrikethroughColorWell: NSColorWell {
    override func draw(_ dirtyRect: NSRect) {
        super.draw(dirtyRect)

        if !isEnabled { drawStrikethrough(rect: dirtyRect) }
    }

    private func drawStrikethrough(rect: NSRect) {

        let lightLine = NSBezierPath()
        lightLine.move(to: NSPoint(x: 1, y: 0))
        lightLine.line(to: NSPoint(x: rect.width + 1, y: rect.height))
        lightLine.lineWidth = 2
        NSColor.white.set()
        lightLine.stroke()

        let darkLine = NSBezierPath()
        darkLine.move(to: NSPoint(x: -1, y: 0))
        darkLine.line(to: NSPoint(x: rect.width - 1, y: rect.height))
        darkLine.lineWidth = 2
        NSColor.darkGray.set()
        darkLine.stroke()
    }
}

My next macOS app project has launched: It’s a note-taking app for macOS to help writers write more. In our typical German stoic way, we just call it The Archive.

Check out The Archive!

Its choice of features is closely tied to a few core principles: the user is more important than your app; plain text comes first, so avoid proprietary features and vendor lock-in, thus furthering replicability of the workflow in other apps. I guess we’ll write more about that in the future.

I’m collecting reactions from all around the web already on Pinboard.

Backstage Info

A few details of potential interest to programmers, taken from our Press Kit:

• Development began in December 2016
• Release date: March 15th, 2018
• Coffee consumption: 127.5 jars/95 liters
• Private beta started in May 2017
• 100% written in Swift
• Counted 45922 lines of code in v1.0.0
• Public theme directory hosted on GitHub
• Core technologies used:
  • ReSwift, a unidirectional data flow library, provides the back-bone of data processing
  • RxSwift, a reactive programming library, is used for user interface event handling
• List of all open source third party libraries used: CCNPreferencesWindowController, FlatButton, KeyHolder, Magnet, Result, ReSwift, RxSwift, RxOptional, SwiftDate, SwiftyBeaver, SwiftyUserDefaults, Sparkle
• List of open source libraries published during the course of development: AppGuideOverlay, BetaExpiration, FatSidebar, LoopingAnimation, Omnibar, RxFileMonitor, SwiftXattrs, Typewriter-Modes, TrialLicensing, WebcamSnap
• I also released an Open Source Finder tag to #hashtag converter utility: TagConverter

NSTextView can be customized to display different colors for the insertion point (aka caret, aka text cursor) and for selected text. This is especially useful when you add themes to your editor and the default settings don’t fit anymore.

The default values are not exposed anywhere, so I had to log them and reconstruct convenient accessors to reset a text view if needed:

extension NSTextView {
    static var defaultInsertionPointColor: NSColor { 
        return NSColor.controlTextColor 
    }

    static var defaultSelectedTextAttributes: [NSAttributedStringKey : Any] {
        return [
            .foregroundColor: NSColor.selectedTextColor,
            .backgroundColor: NSColor.selectedTextBackgroundColor
        ]
    }
}