Writing a .service bundle
You can provide system services (items that appear in the Services menu) in two ways: through an application (YourApp.app) or through a standalone service (YourService.service). The first way is well...
View ArticleFaking “switch” with an object value
Jeff Kelley started a thread on the objc-language mailing list with this idea: I would love to see a switch statement we could use for objects, testing equality with each case: statement. @switch would...
View ArticleSwift’s Range Operators
I was going to wait until I had more first-hand experience with Swift before blogging any opinions, but then I remembered this is the Internet. So here I am, late to the party, weighing in on Swift’s...
View ArticleQuick Explanation of the Receipt File
I was explaining the MAS receipt file to a friend and decided to write a blog post instead of an email, on the principle Scott Hanselman has brilliantly advocated that we should conserve and amplify...
View ArticleQuick Explanation of the Term "Application Bundle"
Follow-up to my previous post about receipt files. Again, this is Mac-centric. WHAT IS AN APPLICATION BUNDLE? "Application bundle" is Cocoa developer terminology for an application as it exists in the...
View ArticleThe Incredible Shrinking Docs
Wouldn't you know, I was wondering about documentation in Xcode 8, and indeed it has fundamentally changed. The DevPubs team has hugely reduced the size of the docs and apparently integrated them with...
View ArticleChessFidget
I'm halfway through a 12-week stint at the Recurse Center. One of the first things I did was to write a silly chess app called "ChessFidget" to help myself learn Swift. Here's more about it, including...
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Misnomers in the Docs on Swift Parameters
[I filed this as Radar #31462992. I might be overthinking things — this is a little like quibbling over whether something's a metaphor or a simile — but word choices matter to me. You should see how I...
View ArticleQuick Notes on Printing from AppKit
Recently, while writing a quick Mac app for personal use, I had to refresh my memory on the basics of printing from AppKit. Here, for my future self who will surely have forgotten again, are the basic...
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Forcing Single-Sided Printing with AppKit
I've been hand-writing GOTV postcards for two organizations1, and I decided to write a quick app to print address labels for one of them. (The other requires hand-written addresses.) It's been a long...
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