macOS Storyboard Outlet-Like Connections Between View Controllers

Jun 28th, 2017

Transitioning from Nibs to Storyboards poses a few challenges. One of them being creating outlets from a parent view controller to a child view controller. There is no such thing. You could say this is the new idiomatic way to create interfaces, but I don’t quite agree with the consequences. How do you pass data to a view controller 4 levels deep in the hierarchy? It’s not obvious. And there are no “embed” segues like you have them on iOS to obtain references.

NSSplitViewItem Vibrancy Is Not Added with Every Initializer

Jun 18th, 2017

After yesterday’s wrap up of my fix for vibrant table views, I have discovered that NSSplitViewItem has 3 initializer variants since macOS 10.11: The latter will not add vibrancy. Guess who, by accident, discovered his table view to be wrapped in a init(sidebarWithViewController:) call.

Fixing NSTableView Cell Backgrounds by Deactivating NSSplitViewItem’s Visual Effects

Jun 17th, 2017

I discovered my own idiocy and found that I overlooked which initializer of NSSplitViewItem was called. Apparently, the sidebar-related one adds vibrancy by default. Dealing with un-vibrancifying a table view might still be interesting, so I leave this up.

ReSwift Niceties: The Current State Getter

Jun 10th, 2017

When you have a reference to your store of ReSwift.StoreType, you can use the current state property to get to a value directly. This means you don’t even need to make the object a store subscriber to grant access to some store state. I don’t recommend doing this in real code, of course. This is just like any global variable and comes with the usual problems.

Adding last(where:) in Swift

Jun 10th, 2017

For quite a while I didn’t notice Sequence.first(where:) exists. It’s like first, only with a condition. Proposed and implemented by Russ Bishop, by the way. I have now happily migrated from my self-baked findFirst to this method – only to find out today that there’s not last(where:) equivalent.

The 3 RxSwift Building Blocks of UI Components

Jun 2nd, 2017

So here’s what I learned so far about the building blocks of reactive UI components from peeking at the RxCocoa source. UI components in general can have properties (read/write), input ports (read), and output ports (write). Classic UIKit/AppKit output ports would be delegate calls; classic input ports would be commands like display(banana:) that you probably write every day or so.