Earlier today, I was posting some ad-hoc thoughts about how I prefer SwiftUI layout over programmatic AppKit on Mastodon. I expected this to become a blog post later today. But instead, I find myself thinking along the lines of: “am I holding this wrong?”
The whole responder chain is traversed like the following, via the documentation for NSApplication.sendAction(_:to:from:): First, NSResponder.respondsToSelector(_:) is called to check if the current candidate is a match; if this returns false, NSResponder.supplementalTarget(forAction:sender:) is sent to get to another receiver to delegate the call to.
I noticed this when experimenting with multiple tabs. When you set NSWindow.title to an empty String "", the window/tab will be hidden from the window list in the submenu below the “Window” main menu’s item. I expected a menu item with an empty label, but instead you get no item at all.
Two years ago, I wrote about how I implemented a toolbar with NSSegmentedControl, much like Apple’s own apps have them since macOS 10.11 Yosemite. Last week I discovered my implementation was buggy: it did not work at all when you customize the toolbar to show “Icon Only”, i.e. hide the label text.
When I added a sheet to display on top of TableFlips’ document, I wondered why the text field appear disabled, tabbing through elements didn’t work, and overall functionality was limited to accepting click events: It turned out you have to make sure that you disable most of the NSWindow settings in Interface Builder except the title bar (NSTitledWindowMask). Only with a title bar (which is never visible in a sheet anyway) will the interaction work properly.
Today I learned that a NSWindow’s field editor cannot trivially be set to “single line mode.” A field editor is a NSText subclass like NSTextView, but NSTextField is only a configurable widget that uses the field editor. How does the “single line mode” setting do what it does? I have no clue.
Check boxes in AppKit are realized with buttons. The API reads kind of weird, because the NSButton.state property does so many things, so here’s a simple subclass I do sometimes employ: Now it’s easy to use checkbox.isChecked = true. I’d even consider check() and uncheck() commands if I used this in many places to reduce the noise and clarify what’s going on further, maybe.
This post is part of a series on getting NSSegmentedControl to work in your toolbars. Earlier this week I posted how to create a segmented toolbar item with 1 label for each segment. Now some options in TableFlip depend on context: without a selected cell, you cannot remove the selection, for example. So I disabled some segments and it looked alright:
Ever wondered how Apple Mail’s NSToolbar achieves the effect of individually labeled buttons shown in groups? Update 2018-11-23: I discovered a flaw in the target–action-mechanism of NSToolbarItems. They don’t fire if the label is hidden. This post’s approach is still valid enough, but is now part of a series of posts on the topic, with the 3rd one providing a fix:
Recently on Google+, someone recommended Wallace Wang’s Swift OS X Programming for Absolute Beginners. Well, I’m not a beginner anymore, but the book sounded fun, so I gave it a spin. And I’m quite impressed. That’s why you read the review here. In short, Swift OS X Programming for Absolute Beginners (or SOXPAB as I would like to call it to save myself from typing that much) is the best programming book to teach the reader about user interface programming. I can’t honestly judge how well this textbook will actually work for non-programmers. But that’s because I can’t fathom learning to code from a book anyway. If you know programming, or the Cocoa APIs already, this should work for you.