Cocoa Archives - Page 2 of 3

DKActionButton: Cocoa Action Buttons Made Easy

Bringing use to my cocoa icons is DKActionButton, an easy to use class that allows you to create ‘action buttons’ as found in many cocoa apps today. DKActionButton is used in App Stop, along with another unreleased application (hence the DK prefix). Heres what it looks like in action: DKActionButton is pretty easy to use and simply takes a couple minutes worth of work in interface builder and a couple lines of code. You can download DKActionButton along with a sample application here. DKActionButton licensed under the BSD, so you can use it in commercial/shareware apps.

Almost There: App Stop V2.0

After many months of development I’m happy to announce that App Stop V2.0 is almost done and will be released, by the latest, in two weeks. The main changes in App Stop V2 are under the hood. Almost the entire code base has been rewritten. This fixes the two major issues with App Stop 1.1: performance, and Intel incompatibility. App Stop is 2-5x faster and now runs on Intel based Macs. Of course App Stop V2 will also come with a slew of enhancements, UI tweaks, and bug fixes; but the main focus for this release was performance and Intel compatibility. Keep checking the blog for updates, but in the meantime here is the new ‘table view’ (now called the Application Manager) in App Stop V2.

Gear Icon & Add Menu Icon

The last set (at least for now) of my common icons for Cocoa development are the gear/action menu icon, and the add menu icon. You can download the tiff images and Pixen source files here. Feel free to use these icons in any of your projects. These are all the icons I have to release to the community right now. I have a some custom UI classes that I’ll be releasing soon that you can use these icons in.

Back From C4

Well, yesterday I came from C4. C4 was the first developers conference I have attended, and it was well worth going. I met lots of cool people: some who already have some apps out, some who havent released anything – yet. The Funny There is, at least for me, two pretty funny & memorable moments of C4. Before Brian W. Fitzpatrick gave his talk on the future of subversion he said “All information in this talk is under the NDA.” I immediately got really excited, I’ve never heard NDA information before, and this was about subversion, software I actually use! He follows that up with “Yeah, it is ‘Not Decided Apon’.” That gave me a good laugh 🙂 Aaron Hillegass was the guest speaker at C4…

Plus & Minus Icons

Continuing the trend of releasing common icons used in application development, I present you with the ubiquitous plus and minus (or add & remove as they are known in some parts) icons: You can download the tiff images and Pixen source files here. Feel free to use these icons in any of your projects.

WWDC Announcement Thoughts

The announcements this year are not as impressive as last year. Probably the most exciting thing for most people this year is the new Mac Pro: 16GB of RAM, 2TB of storage, dual 64 bit 3GHZ processors. Wow, I want one. I am sort of disappointed with the end-user Leopard features. The time machine idea sounds and looks cool, but I’m wondering how useful it will be and how much it will slow down my computer. The improvements to iChat are very welcome, and the screen sharing feature looks incredible. Spaces looks awesome, finally we are going to get built in virtual desktops. I really don’t use Dashboard or iCal, so changes to those areas of the OS don’t really affect me…

XASH 1.3

XASH 1.3 has finally been released!..

What Does NSString’s Length Method Really Return?

You would think that it returns the number of characters in the NSString, but it doesn’t. Instead, it returns the number of unichars (1 or 2 byte characters). So as far as -[NSString length] is concerned every 4 byte unicode character (the double flat, for instance) counts as 2 characters even though it’ll only be displayed as one character on screen. This isn’t a bug per-say in -[NSString length], but it’s not the behavior I was expecting…

Disabling NSTableView Sorting While Using Bindings

Cocoa is very nice in that it gives you alot of functionality “for free”; spell checking, table sorting, text searching, font selection, etc, etc. Unfortunately it can be hard to disable the “for free” functionality; for instance, table sorting. To disable table sorting in a NSTableView using Cocoa bindings (via NSArrayController) isn’t as simple as clicking a “isSortable” checkbox in interface builder, or calling -[table setIsSortable:NO];; the solution is less straightforward than you would expect. Apple hasn’t documented how to disable sorting in table views using bindings, so it was up to a clever programmer to figure it out…

Prosit Software: iDictionary 1.0

I’ve finally unveiled what has been keeping me busy over the last few months: iDictionary 1.0; my first shareware application. iDictionary enables you to put a dictionary or thesaurus on your iPod, check out the product page for more information. Now that I have released that, I’ll have some more time to put into this site. I have a couple of new open-source things I’ve been wanting to put up for download, so hopefully I’ll be able to put that up soon.

Category: Cocoa