Last night at NSCoder night, Fraser Hess was asking question about being able to draw in a Quartz Composer View (QCView) about which none of the rest of us had any knowledge or experience. As I’ve been doing a lot with Core Animation lately, I asked him if it was possible to just make the view layer backed and start adding layers to it. Fraser hasn’t worked with Core Animation much yet, so he was unsure. The other three of us set to looking at docs and making demo apps. The race was on… Oh. It’s not a race? Sorry about that. I thought we were practicing for Iron Coder…
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A couple of weeks ago we discussed how to build frameworks and how to bundle them with a Cocoa application. This week we are going to build on that knowledge and add Plug-ins to a Cocoa application.

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I’ve been experimenting a great deal lately with OpenGL and QuickTime trying to see how the two technologies work together. It’s been a bit challenging, but fortunately Apple provides two really great resources–number one, sample code. I’ve been able to learn a lot just from the samples they provide in the development tools examples as well as online. And second, the cocoa-dev and quicktime-api lists are great. Lot’s of brilliant people there who are willing to share their knowledge. It’s very helpful, prohibition to discuss the iPhone SDK notwithstanding.

Getting two technologies to work together can be a challenge especially when the bridges between the two are not necessarily clearly laid out in documentation. As I pointed out Apple provides some excellent sample code to help you along, but there is no hand-holding approach to any of it. I actually appreciate that having come from the Windows world as it seems that there all you get sometimes is hand-holding where Microsoft doesn’t trust you, the developer to figure things out and really own what you’re doing. But I digress (wouldn’t be a CIMGF post if I didn’t dig on MS a bit).
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There are numerous situations where creating your own framework is advantageous. Perhaps you have a block of code that you use repeatedly in many different projects. Perhaps you are building a plug-in system for your application and want the infrastructure to be available both to the application and to any plugins that are coded.

A Cocoa framework is another project type in Xcode. The end result is a bundle, similar to an application bundle. Inside of this bundle is the compiled code you wrote and any headers that you want exposed. The headers are important. Without them, just like any other piece of Objective-C code, it is very hard to code against.

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Sync Services have come a long way in Leopard. Before Leopard it was an extremely complex operation that was almost completely manual. Needless to say, this sucked and it was probably one of the reasons it was shunned by most developers.

If you are using Core Data in a Leopard application then Sync Services is so trivial that you should be syncing if it makes sense. In this article we are going to cover syncing in a non-Core Data situation as that is quite a bit more complex.

If you have read the Sync Services documentation then you know it is complex. Let me dispel an illusion right away. It is hard. It is not poor documentation, syncing is very hard and very few people get it right. Take a look at Omnifocus to see an example of a company thinking it is easy and losing data. Therefore if you are expecting this subject to be trivial you will be disappointed.

In this example we will be syncing with the bookmarks schema and displaying them in a simple outline view. The outline view itself will be editable and those edits can be synced back. Not terribly useful but provides a very simple example.
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I think it may be helpful to demonstrate how to perform certain tasks in Cocoa from the perspective of a Windows programmer. And considering that I was one, it seems that I may be able to help shine some light on some of the issues that programmers face when coming over to the Mac platform. In this post I want to highlight one of Objective-C’s coolest features, key-value coding, in light of a Microsoft technology that was introduced in the most recent edition of the .NET framework (v3.5).

Microsoft’s new technology called LINQ, which stands for Language Integrated Query provides a way for developers to massage data collections using a SQL-like syntax that is built right into the language. You can perform simple data queries like this.

List products = GetProductList();

var soldOutProducts =
    from p in products
    where p.UnitsInStock == 0
    select p;
    
Console.WriteLine("Sold out products:");
foreach (var product in soldOutProducts)
{
    Console.WriteLine("{0} is sold out!", product.ProductName);
}

Notice how it has a very SQL like syntax. It’s actually very powerful and robust. There are a lot of capabilities. Take a look at the 101 LINQ Samples page if you would like to see more examples. What’s most interesting to me though is that the ideas behind this technology are not new.

If you’re new to Cocoa, you’ve probably heard of key-value coding and have probably even worked through some examples of its use without really understanding it. While the usage is different between the two, these technologies provide similar capabilities. Objective-C just had them first.
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Let us pretend for a moment that NSXMLDocument was not available to your Cocoa application for some reason. Perhaps you have low memory requirements, perhaps you are running on a slimmed down version of OS X. Whatever the reason, for the purposes of this exercise, NSXMLDocument does not exist.

Let us now assume that we have a requirement to parse an xml document quickly and without loading the entire tree into memory in a object structure. In a situation like this libxml comes in handy. Unfortunately it is quite a bit more complicated than calling alloc init on NSXMLDocument.

libxml is a C library that is included with all current releases of OS X. With this library we can quickly read in a document, scrape the information we need out of that document and avoid loading the entire tree into memory at once. In addition, libxml (and more specifically xmlReader) does this very quickly, far faster than NSXMLDocument which is very useful when you have a lower end CPU. In this project we are going to create a simple application that reads in an xml file containing a list of people, their names and their ages. For the purposes of demonstration we are going to load that data into an array of NSDictionary objects and display it in a standard Cocoa window.

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Encapsulate everything! Right? Or not. I was watching the Cocoa developers email list today and saw a post asking for help getting two views to communicate between one another. Having been a Windows programmer for longer than I’m willing to admit, I recognized the question as it was one that I also had when I moved to Objective-C on the Mac. I think I can ask the question more succinctly now than I could then. Better phrased it would be “I have a dialog object that I instantiated and obtained some data from the user with it. I now need to get that data out of my dialog object back into my main window object where I can do something with it. How can I get the information back into my main window from the dialog?”

In Windows, more specifically C# .NET, you would create a new window by adding a Windows Form object that you could then edit with the designer adding various controls pretty easily. But once that window was created, you now need to create an instance of it in your main window code and then provide public accessors to assign or obtain data between the two windows. The window class generated by the Windows Form template encapsulates everything for you. It certainly makes the code look clean, but it really breaks the Model View Controller paradigm so it’s no wonder Windows programmers (myself included) have a hard time shifting their way of thinking.
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This is just another one of those things that seems like it ought to be a simple little code snippet and you’re there, but in actuality it’s just not the case. I am building an exporter for my application that will export a movie project in iMovie HD format. I want to mimic the file format exactly and one of the things I noticed about the directories that are stored inside iMovie HD‘s custom format (select ‘Show Package Contents’ from the context menu in the Finder) is that they have custom icons assigned to them. So the problem to solve was how to do that programatically. Here is what I’ve found.
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For most simple applications using and managing resources is handled seamlessly and you don’t ever have to intervene programatically. There are times, however, as your applications begin to mature that you need to access resources directly. Doing so is pretty straightforward, but I thought I would document it here–if for no other reason than to have it written down somewhere for the next time I need it. I hope it might be helpful to you too.
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As a follow-up to the previous blog post: Cocoa Tutorial: Using NSError to Great Effect; in this post I am going to demonstrate a few things that can be done with NSError objects that have been received. Specifically, how to add options to an NSError and how to (hopefully) recover from one.
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In this continuing series on my own transition from a Mac application hacker to microISV (Independent Software Vendor), I am going to demonstrate how to create your own file format for your application. You’ve probably seen these types of files in popular applications such as iMovie HD (06′) or GarageBand or even xcode in which the actual files used are, behind the scenes, folders that the operating system treats as regular files. These folders/files have a special bit set on them that tell OS X how to deal with them. The goal of this post is to demonstrate how you can do the following:

• Create your own file format with your own file extension
• Register your file format with the operating system
• Provide application loading of your file that’s been double clicked in the Finder
• Write data and preferences back out to your application file
• Add resources such as media files to your application file

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I often find and therefore come to expect common problems in Cocoa to be easily solvable, however, there are times, like this, where I am a bit disappointed that the problem can be so difficult. All I need to do is copy a file. This is a simple task right? All you need is NSFileManager and a call to – (BOOL)copyPath:(NSString *)source toPath:(NSString *)destination handler:(id)handler and you’re good to go. Not so fast, city slicker. This one is going to take a bit more effort cause you want one of them fancy new-fangled progress indicators to show how much of the file has been copied. Well, if you want Cocoa to help you, you’re out of luck cause NSFileManager won’t do that for you, but with a little bit of effort you can get it to work with some… gulp… C APIs.
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Undo support in Cocoa is fantastic but for those who have tried to mix it with Core Data know that it can be a bit frustrating. Generally, undo support can be ignored in most applications and it will “just work”. But when Core Data is added to the recipe then things get a bit confusing and more complicated.

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In this post I continue to address topics of relevance to Macintosh programmers who are, like me, moving from being hackers to becoming independent software vendors (micro ISV). Today I am going to address adding copyright and version information to your about dialog and show you how you can update these dynamically. I also cover a few tips on formatting the text in your about dialog. There is more than one way to achieve these things, but my hope is to help others out there who need to accomplish these things and have no prior experience doing them on the Mac.
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