I’m working on an application that will be going into a private beta pretty soon, followed by a public beta. One of the things I wanted to do was make sure the application stopped working after 30 days from when it was built. This is to make sure the beta testers are running the latest [...]

Key-Value Coding is part of the magic behind Cocoa’s bindings. Up until yesterday I had only been binding to an ObjectController or to an ArrayController backed by Core Data. This is very powerful, but bindings pre-date Core Data so clearly not a necessity. So yesterday I went to bind an NSProgressIndicator’s ‘isIndeteriminate’ to a BOOL. [...]

To get the icon that represents an application with no custom icon (default application icon) just call: [NSImage imageNamed:@“NSDefaultApplicationIcon”];

When using Core Data, Boolean values as an attribute are represented using NSNumber. That’s all fine and good, but it requires you to use [NSNumber numberWithBool:YES|NO] when you set the value.

NO is defined as:

define NO (BOOL)0

we have an issue. 0 is also [...]

Somewhere there exists a list of words you shouldn’t assign as attributes within Core Data. I don’t know where that list is, and today I got bit by not knowing. I tried to use the word “deleted” as an attribute. No matter how hard I tried to set the “deleted” value and [...]

NSString has a great little method prototyped as

- (id)propertyList

What does it do? To quote the docs:

Parses the receiver as a text representation of a property list, returning an NSString, NSData, NSArray, or NSDictionary object, according to the topmost element.

If you started staring at CFPropertyList(…) functions, just trying to figure out how to read a [...]

I’m in debt to a lot of people for their help with rooVid. For some, the help was directly pointed at rooVid via questions I asked or suggestions made. For countless others it was via the wonderful blessing that is the web. One of the things I get a kick out of [...]

Appcasting seems like a great idea to me. In short, an appcast is an RSS feed with an enclosure that is your latest release. I was turned on to appcasting when I found out about Sparkle. Sparkle made it super easy for me to add “check for update…” support to rooVid (it’ll [...]

I’m trying to load a NSPanel with a controller that inherits from NSWindowController. So my controller’s init calls:

self = [super initWithWindowNibName:@"NibNameHere"];

and then I call showWindow on my now init’d controller object. All pretty straight forward. Problem is that the dang “window” assigned to files owner wasn’t showing up. [...]

After spending the past couple nights with them, I can say with ease: Cocoa’s Distributed Objects are very nice. I’ve used other IPC mechanisms before (FIFOs or named pipes, sockets, etc.). Distributed objects remove at least %90 of the work compared to traditional IPC mechanisms. Cocoa continues to please.