These are two misfeatures that appeared in macOS Sonoma (I believe). They are where a closed sidebar forces its way back into view temporarily, if the mouse comes to rest near the relevant edge of the window. It’s easy to see how some UI designer thought this was a good idea. Surely if you move… Read more
It’s the little things that sometimes impress me the most. Like when this dialog appeared: …after I’d filled out a form PDF that was emailed to me. It had exactly the option I wanted first and foremost, to send the completed PDF back to the sender. Sure, manually digging up the completed PDF from disk… Read more
Actionable, a. A veiled proxy for the speaker’s laziness. Used as in “this isn’t actionable” to mean one or more of: Cannot Reproduce, n. A versatile term, often found as a formal state in bug / ticket tracking systems, which can mean various things: Crowdsourcing, n. The practice of making other people do your work… Read more
Ugh. This was annoying to figure out. If you have a framework target in Xcode with a modulemap – e.g. because you’re wrapping a C or C++ library for use in Swift – you must keep the module verifier enabled (the ENABLE_MODULE_VERIFIER build setting) for that framework, otherwise any Swift targets using that framework won’t… Read more
SwiftUI doesn’t offer anything equivalent to NSFilePromiseProvider, i.e. to write data to the drop destination. You have to ditch SwiftUI and use AppKit’s drag & drop APIs instead. FB13583826. Is that it? I know that’s not a very helpful in some sense, but I wasted days trying to figure out how to implement this very… Read more
Perhaps in karmic balance of my previous post critical of one of Apple’s APIs, I want to highlight an Apple OS feature that I use every day, that ironically is so simple, obvious, and reliable that I almost never stop to appreciate it. Universal Clipboard basically just means you can copy something on one device… Read more
I find FileManager‘s url(for:in:appropriateFor:create:) to be very unintuitive. It seems to have multiple, largely-orthogonal functions. It can provide paths to common folders (albeit badly). It can create temporary folders. It can locate volume-specific bins (Trash folders). It is an example of bad API design. Specifically, regarding cohesion: the principle that an API should have one… Read more