Messages to Nowhere

This article has been updated, and moved here

NSWindow setResizable:

This article has been updated moved to a new location.

NSWorkspace Bug in - openFile: ?

EDITED TO ADD: I could reproduce this bug in a large project, but not isolate it in a smaller one. It is much likely for my code to have a bug then NSWorkspace. I’m still not 100% certain that this issue wasn’t my fault in some way I don’t understand. But no [...]

Crash Logs

Daniel Jalkut on how to get the most out of crash logs. It’s good advice.
Actually I do have one big issue with the article:
If there’s one behavior of your application that you should focus on eliminating, it’s the behavior of crashing. Above all other “nuisances,” this is the one that is absolutely unacceptable.
But preserving someone’s [...]

Useful MacOSX Terminal Commands

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Design Process: Current Location “Headline”

This is a bit of the design process behind one line of one settings panel inside IMLocation.
The “Locations” panel controls everything having to do with to locations. The pane’s “headline”, outlined in red, shows what is assumed to be the current location.

It reads like “Your current location is home”. It does not say [...]

An AppleScript Quine

A few days ago, out of morbid curiosity, I went looking for a a quine written in AppleScript. To my surprise, I couldn’t find one.
I’d never actually written a quine before, so this was a good ‘excuse’ to make one (and brush up on some computability theory — use it or lose it).
Well, here [...]

Interfacing With (Hacking) iChat in Leopard

Before you consider using any of the unsupported hacks I’m about to discuss, check to see if existing frameworks , or iChat’s AppleScript interface, will do what you need. Any software update can break unsupported code in unpredictable ways at any time. When Leopard came out, all the hacks I had been using [...]

Getting Mac OS X Version Information At Runtime

This article has been updated, and republished here.

Running in the Background

If you want your bundled application to run in the background — not show up in the dock — here’s what you do. Add

<key> LSUIElement</key>
<string>1</string>
(exclusive) or
<key>LSBackgroundOnly</key>
<string>1</string>

To your info.plist file. Use only one or the other.
LSUIElement will let you put up windows and dialogs. They’ll appear in the context of [...]