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:
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.
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:
I spent the last 15 or so months developing this beast. If you follow my ramblings, you will know that I get to work every day at about 7 a.m. and work until about 5:30 p.m., including workouts and breaks. Since I didn’t use a time tracker like Timing (affiliate link) for most of the time, I cannot say how many hours I really spent coding, sadly.
Anyway. The launch. The Archive will go live March 15th. I’ll publicize the app info page, soon.
And then I’ll spend some leisure time writing a postmortem. The beta testers have been a pleasure to work with, as always. It’s amazing how much love strangers are willing to give for carefully crafted products.
This closes a weird circle for me: my first Cocoa coding experience was adding Markdown preview to Notational Velocity in 2010, which I barely managed, having had zero understanding of Objective-C and how Xcode worked. Now I am able to create an app that exceeds NV’s capabilities all on my own. I’m very happy about this coding journey, and oh boy do I have a lot of cool stuff I am going to add after v1.0 goes live!
I am using ReSwift in my app. I like ReSwift because I can create a representation of my app in a “State” Swift module without any UIKit/AppKit dependency. There, I put all the data that the app is supposed to represent at any given moment in time. To get a feeling for this, have a look at two apps of mine: