After my post last week about the updates I made to my audio app Ears, longtime internet buddy @macrael asked:
@tylerhall Do you use libraries for the hotkey-setting UI or the start-on-launch stuff? I'm putting together my first Mac app and am looking into those parts rn.
I do, actually. In addition to replying to MacRae on the nightmare birdsite, I thought I'd post the two helper projects here for anyone else searching.
I really don't know if anyone has a need for this other than me. But I've built this app a few times for myself in the past, so last night I finally took the initiative to make it generic and reusable - both for my future self and anyone else who might find it useful.
It’s called BespokeApp. It’s a simple iOS app that gives you a tabbed web browser with the pre-defined websites of your choosing.
...Firing up Xcode’s wonderful view debugger, however, completely blew my mind and shattered any remaining self-confidence I had as an app developer. And then nearly an hour later I’m really questioning everything I thought I knew about ones and zeroes until a google search leads me to this page. And, sure enough, my bug is spelled out right there.
DefaultApp is an open source starting point – a template. I maintained it in Objective-C for over a decade before finally porting it to Swift in 2018. Anytime I start a new app – big or small, whether or not it’s something I plan on releasing publicly or if it’s just a small prototype or utility app I’m building for myself – I start with this project.
With DefaultApp I can go from initial idea to writing actual code in thirty seconds.
That said, I would't use this as the basis for a billion dollar corporation’s enterprise app. Or with a team of “100 engineers” “solving hard problems”. But if you’re a one-person development shop or a team of just two or three engineers building a typical macOS shoebox or document based app? Please take a look.
I live and die by my keyboard. And here are the shortcuts I couldn’t do without. (Maybe this post should have been titled "A Love Letter to KeybaordMaestro".)
I've worked with a bunch of different automated iOS build systems over the years at the various companies I've worked for and with my own apps. In the early days of the App Store, many of these were completely home grown. As the toolchain matured, I've dealt with Xcode bots...
Last month, my 9-5 job was kind enough to gift me an iPad Pro and its new keyboard. I've had a few iPads in the past, but they've always ended up stashed away, unused, in a drawer somewhere. I simply never got hooked on their utility. I never found that...
If you work with two monitors of different sizes, Xcode has an annoying bug of launching the iOS Simulator partially off screen — forcing you to manually drag it into position using the mouse. It's not that bad the first time, but after a full eight hour working day with...
Last week I released a minor update to VirtualHostX. Shortly thereafter, my inbox was flooded with reports of an "unsupported architecture" error on launch. After a quick lipo test I verified that somehow I had managed to build and ship the app as Intel only — no PowerPC support. I went...
For any Mac developers out there who are seeing the following rejection notice when submitting to the Mac App Store: Unsupported Architecture - Application executables may support either or both of the Intel architectures Make sure you verify that any included frameworks are Intel only. You can do this using the lipo...
Earlier this week, the Chromium Blog announced an official extension API for Chrome's omnibox (search bar). I've always loved keyboard driven interfaces — the command line, [Quicksilver](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quicksilver_(software)), Alfred, etc — so, I immediately started thinking about what I could build with it. My first idea was a documentation browser for Apple's...
