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. Well, to make a painful story short, the problem was that I stupidly wrote a ‘window’ method myself which overrode NSWindowController’s window method and understandably confused/broke things. Not sure what I was thinking, probably something like “oh, I need that ‘window’ reference elsewhere, I must need a – (NSPanel *) window, let me just create that now”. Nuked the – window and all was better in the world. It’s been a tough 24 hours.

The lesson learned? If you’re panel or window isn’t showing up when you run initWithWindowNibName / showWindow, make sure you haven’t overloaded any of your base class implementations with a wrong one of your own. Although, 90% of the time it probably just means you didn’t set ‘window’ for your Files Owner in IB.

When IB knows about an outlet or action that isn’t wired up, the icon in the instances tab gets an exclamation point in its lower left hand corner. This is a great feature. However, knowing that I hadn’t yet wired everything up I was fine with my controller having the exclamation point. Little did I know I actually forget to wire up an outlet I was trying to use. Ugh. So the lesson for today was “look at what’s not wired up, and if you can, just wire them all up to stubs so the exclamation point carries the meaning it deserves”.

To prevent this in the future, I’d like to be able to run in a debug mode where I get an NSLog(@”BOZO!”) every time a message was sent to nil. Is that wrong / unreasonable? Does this mode already exist and is easy to attain?