Not A Blog
Not a Blog

A place to save useful development notes.

One of the problems with developing something new for a new platform is knowing just what to do. As a long time Windows developer, I know what I want to achieve, but don't know how to achieve it. It's very frustrating.

I started out fixing this with a Mac app template project, which proved very instructional but didn't really reflect a real world application. So I created a second in Mac application, based on a more realistic app. Doing this gave more insight into what it was that I didn't know.

My first app is now at a stage where I have built a working application with the majority of the functionality it needs to operate. Along the way, I had many challenges to overcome. Some relatively simple and some rather complex. This section is intended to document some of these challenges and the solutions I came up with.

Along the way, I may well come up with other stuff that I need to document be it Macos, iOS or anything else. I'll add those in as and when.

Displaying a custom About box

  • MacOS
  • Dialogs
  • About

When you create a Mac app, a lot of code is created for you without you having to do any work. Just creating the app and running it shows you how much functionality has been generated. Part of that includes a default about box, which is 'adequate' but not exactly helpful.

Creating a tabbed settings screen

  • MacOS
  • Dialogs
  • Settings

Very few applications don’t have some kind of user settings. Little tweaks that make the application more customisable by the user. They are what makes an application more flexible and, by implication, more likely to be adopted by a wider audience. When you create a blank MacOS project, you will see that there is no settings menu item provided by default. While the templates give you a lot, we're on our own when it comes to settings. Not too unreasonable as the template designers couldn't be expected to know what settings you require.

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