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

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 finally got sick of changing MyCompanyName in my new source files. To change MyCompanyName to something useful, you need to edit the ORGANIZATIONNAME in the com.apple.Xcode prefs. I used the ‘defaults write’ method described here, which looks like this: defaults write com.apple.Xcode PBXCustomTemplateMacroDefinitions \ ‘{ “ORGANIZATIONNAME” = “__YourCompanyName__”;}’ Surprisingly, I had to quit and reopen […]

Think first. Think some more. Think about the whole problem. Think about a little part of the problem you’re going to start with. Think about the whole thing again, in relation to your idea on the starting point.            -Wil Shipley My app had some code that would allow the user to spawn an unlimited number of helper […]

AppleScript expects files in the form of Users:bcooke:Movies:blah.mov If you’re like most sane people, you want to use /Users/bcooke/Movies/blah.mov To do this, you just have to prefix your path with ‘posix file’. via Sundown via google

In QuickTime’s export dialog, “MPEG-4 Audio” is “AAC”. Somehow iMovie and QuickTime are using a different dialog for their export “sound” options. Compare the two lists of compressors below: Default Sound options when using ‘MovieExportDoUserDialog’ QuickTime 7 and iMovie’s dialog The QT7/iMovie dialog has some clear advantages. Shorter MPEG-4 Audio is re-worded as AAC (as far as I […]

If your window doesn’t have an “InitialFirstResponder” set, each elements “nextKeyView” is ignored. I guess that makes sense? Something to remember anyway.

My copy of iLife ‘06 showed up today. I don’t feel like I’m the right person to give it a full review, but here’s my two cents: iPhoto: is much faster (seriously, *much* faster with my 5613 photos), has cool date overlay when scrolling, a nice full screen implementation, photocasting (would love this if […]

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.