Borkware Quickies

Binding an NSPopupButton (General->General)

Tue, 29 Dec 2009 21:38:27 UTC

To bind an NSPopupButton:

Have an NSArray somewhere that you want to supply the popup
Make an NSArrayController in the nib file (say call it "greeble"), and binds its Value to some keypath (such as your AppDelegate.greebleArray ivar)
Bind the popup's Content to the array controller's arranged objects (greeble.arrangedObjects). These are the objects that are behind the popup.
Bind the popup's Content Values to a key path that includes a displayable string. Assuming the objets in the greebleArray array have a title property, you'd bind it to greeble.arrangedObjects.title
Bind the popup's Selected Object to something, such as an ivar of the type of object that's in the greebleArray. If said ivar is called selectedGreeble, you'd bind to AppDelegate's selectedGreeble.

Continuous Text Field (General->General)

Tue, 29 Dec 2009 15:54:36 UTC

Courtesy of Jens Bauer. Sometimes you'd like a text field to notify on every text change.

@interface FSContinousTextField : NSTextField
@end

@implementation FSContinousTextField

- (void) textDidChange: (NSNotification *) aNotification {
	[[self target] performSelector:[self action] withObject:self];
}

@end

Hiding TOC bar in xcode permanently (Xcode->General)

Tue, 29 Dec 2009 14:07:53 UTC

Thanks to Jens Bauer who sent this my way.

"When I option-double-click an object in my source-code, I got a surprise with newer Xcodes. There's a huge TOC bar in the left side, forcing me to have a large window, that overlaps my source-code, so I can't look at the documentation and type at the same time. Furthermore it makes the sentences very 'tall', which I can't get used to. So I dropped my coding, went for a hunt. I wanted to go and get rid of that annoying demon. I found it and cast it out (By hand!)"

Here's how Jens cast out that demon. It's two different edits:

To make the TOC section (left side bar) of the developer documentation default to be hidden, do as follows:

Before you begin, make the two files and their parent-folders writable.

In the file....

/Developer/Documentation/DocSets/com.apple.ADC_Reference_Library.CoreReference.docset/Contents/Resources/Documents/documentation/Resources/CSS/frameset_styles.css

...change the line...

#bodyText { margin-left: 210px; }

...to read...

#bodyText { /* margin-left: 210px; */ margin-left:10px; /* TOC-FIX */ }

...And in the file...

/Developer/Documentation/DocSets/com.apple.ADC_Reference_Library.CoreReference.docset/Contents/Resources/Documents/documentation/Resources/JavaScript/page.js

...add the following somewhere in initialize_page() function, for instance at the bottom, right before the closing brace...

showHideTOC('hide'); // TOC-FIX

...now you have a much better view!!

Note that you'll need to apply this patch when the docs get upgraded.

Converting xsd:date to NSDate (NSDate->General)

Fri, 25 Dec 2009 20:10:40 UTC

xsd:date has a format that's a subset of the full ISO8601 format. Here's a quick way to convert an xsd:date to an NSDate. Based on a forum posting by Jens Alfke. For a full ISO 8601 parser, check out the one by Peter Hosey.

Note that thiscode

NSDate *xsdDateTimeToNSDate (NSString *dateTime) {
    static NSDateFormatter *xsdDateTimeFormatter;
    if (!xsdDateTimeFormatter) {
        xsdDateTimeFormatter = [[NSDateFormatter alloc] init];  // Keep around forever
        xsdDateTimeFormatter.timeStyle = NSDateFormatterFullStyle;
        xsdDateTimeFormatter.dateFormat = @"yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:sszzz";
    }

    // Date formatters don't grok a single trailing Z, so make it "GMT".
    if ([dateTime hasSuffix: @"Z"]) {
        dateTime = [[dateTime substringToIndex: dateTime.length - 1]
                       stringByAppendingString: @"GMT"];
    }

    NSDate *date = [xsdDateTimeFormatter dateFromString: dateTime];
    if (!date) NSLog(@"could not parse date '%@'", dateTime);

    return (date);

} // xsdDateTimeToNSDate

Supplying bitbucket username / password (Mercurial->General)

Fri, 25 Dec 2009 17:33:48 UTC

BitBucket provides Mercurial hosting. It's kind of a pain to have to provide a username/password on every pull or push. So, just add something like this to your ~/.hgrc file and make sure the permissions on the file are such that nobody else can read it.

[auth]
bitbucket.prefix = bitbucket.org/markd2
bitbucket.username = markd2
bitbucket.password = B4dg3rzRuL3
bitbucket.schemes = http https

So now when you do a

% hg push https://bitbucket.org/markd2/borkfit

no need to authorize.

Ignore files (Mercurial->General)

Fri, 25 Dec 2009 16:57:25 UTC

Tired of build directories or .DS_Store files showing up in hg status? Make a .hgignore at the top level of your repository. It supports glob and regex, and plain names. man hgignore for more details.

Trimming whitespace from ends of a string (NSString->General)

Thu, 24 Dec 2009 23:26:04 UTC



    NSString *ook = @"\n \t\t hello there \t\n  \n\n";
    NSString *trimmed =
        [ook stringByTrimmingCharactersInSet:
                 [NSCharacterSet whitespaceAndNewlineCharacterSet]];

    NSLog(@"trimmed: '%@'", trimmed);

produces

2009-12-24 18:24:42.431 trim[6799:903] trimmed: 'hello there'

Beware BOOL results from objc_msgSend (Objective-C->Random)

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 14:04:33 UTC

Courtesy of David Philip Oster, from GTMNSEnumerator+Filter.m:

// We must take care here, since Intel leaves junk in high bytes of return register
// for predicates that return BOOL.
// For details see: 
// unibin chapter and verse (link currently broken courtesy of Apple)
// and
//comment at red-sweater.
- (BOOL)filterObject:(id)obj returning:(id *)resultp {
  *resultp = obj;
  return ((BOOL (*)(id, SEL, id))objc_msgSend)(obj, operation_, object_);
}

The explicit cast to the expected return value gets rid of the junk.

Lie in wait for a launching process (gdb->General)

Mon, 24 Aug 2009 21:51:24 UTC

Attaching to a running process is pretty nifty, handy for debugging daemons started by launchd. But you miss all the fun stuff that happens at program launch before you you can attach to it.

The attach command's -waitfor option to make gdb lie in wait for a launching process:

% gdb /some/app/blah
(gdb) attach -waitfor blah

Now when a blah process launches, gdb will stop it and attach to it.

Convert a preprocessor symbol to an NSString (General->General)

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 13:36:07 UTC

#define CONVERT_SYMBOL_TO_NSSTRING_2(x) @#x

#define CONVERT_SYMBOL_TO_NSSTRING(x) CONVERT_SYMBOL_TO_NSSTRING_2(x)

NSString *version = CONVERT_SYMBOL_TO_NSSTRING (BUILD_NUMBER);

(Thanks to TVL for helping me figure this one out)

Running a particular architecture (Tools->Hacks)

Mon, 01 Jun 2009 16:53:59 UTC

otest is kind of annoying that it tries to run the 64 bit version of your unit tests, especially if you don't have any. Typically you'd get an error like

2009-06-01 12:49:29.447 otest[70099:203] *** NSTask: Task create for path '/blah/blah/blah' failed: 8, "Exec format error". Terminating temporary process.

You can force otest to run a particular architecture with the arch command:

%  arch -arch i386 /Developer/Tools/otest build/Debug/Snoogle.octest

Creating a disk image from the command line (Unix->General)

Fri, 09 Jan 2009 21:58:44 UTC

% hdiutil create -ov -imagekey zlib-level=9 -fs HFS+ -format UDZO -scrub -srcfolder /Path/To/The/Goodies fooby.dmg

Increasing the length of the "Open Recent" menu (NSDocument->General)

Sat, 29 Nov 2008 19:18:31 UTC

10-15 items not enough for your "Open Recent" menu of a favorite app? Set the app's NSRecentDocumentsLimit default to something more to your liking:

defaults write com.flyingmeat.acorn NSRecentDocumentsLimit 137

(thanks to Gus Mueller for this one)

emacs registers (emacs->General)

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 02:27:11 UTC

Stick something into a register:

(select stuff)
C-x r x 1

where "1" is the register identifier.

Getting stuff out of a register:

C-x r g 1

gdb'ing specific architectures (gdb->Debugging)

Fri, 31 Oct 2008 23:35:56 UTC

With a fat binary (32/64bit), gdb picks the 64 bit version. If you're trying to debug a 32-bit unit test on the command-line though, the 64-bitness of /Developer/Tools/otest gets in the way:

% gdb /Developer/Tools/otest
2008-10-31 19:29:50.834 otest[711:813] Error loading
/blah/blah/blah/build/Debug/Tests.octest/Contents/MacOS/Tests:
dlopen(/blah/blah/blah/build/Debug/Tests.octest/Contents/MacOS/Tests,
265): no suitable image found.  Did find:
        /blah/blah/blah/build/Debug/Tests.octest/Contents/MacOS/Tests:
        mach-o, but wrong architecture
2008-10-31 19:29:50.887 otest[711:813] The test bundle at
build/Debug/Tests.octest could not be loaded because it is built for a
different architecture than the currently-running test rig (which is
running as unknown).
2008-10-31 19:29:50.904 otest[714:203] *** NSTask: Task create for
path '/blah/blah/blah/build/Debug/Tests.octest/Contents/MacOS/Tests'
failed: 8, "Exec format error".  Terminating temporary process.

You can supply a -arch flag to pick what you want:

% gdb -arch i386 /Developer/Tools/otest

And then debug your 32-bit unit test.

Balance a tag in SGML mode (emacs->Random)

Sat, 11 Oct 2008 13:33:15 UTC

C-/

Making "edit all in scope" work (Xcode->Hacks)

Sat, 23 Aug 2008 14:27:00 UTC

Xcode's "Edit All in Scope" feature is inexplicably tied to visible syntax colorization (actually, only Edit All in Scope for object pointers is tied to this, scalar variables and pointers work fine otherwise). So if you're not getting the Edit All in Scope menu item to enable, make sure "Color indexed Symbols" is turned on in the Xcode "Fonts and Colors" preferences.

This advice brought to you by a DTS incident.

Changing MyCompanyName (Xcode->Hacks)

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 13:16:07 UTC

You've probably noticed that source files generated from within XCode include a comment block header:

//
//  TapDance.h
//  Groovilicous
//
//  Created by markd on 7/25/08.
//  Copyright 2008 __MyCompanyName__. All rights reserved.
//

With the __MyCompanyName__ placeholder. There is no UI to change this, for obvious reasons. (Why would anyone want to easily and conveniently change something they'll otherwise need to edit in each and every source file they create. That's unpossible). The obvious solution is to drop to the terminal and run the straightforward command:

% defaults write com.apple.Xcode PBXCustomTemplateMacroDefinitions '{"ORGANIZATIONNAME" = "Borkware";}'

Seemple, no? Zee trick, she is doone.

Seeing extended attributes with 'ls' (Unix->General)

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 00:54:04 UTC

Sometimes you see an @ after the directory permissions in an ls -l:

% ls -l ~/junk/SnapshotRepository.sparseimage
-rw-r--r--@ 1 markd  markd  135270400 Jul 24 20:38 /Users/markd/junk/SnapshotRepository.sparseimage

That means there's some extended attributes. use ls -l@ to see them:

% ls -l@ ~/junk/SnapshotRepository.sparseimage
-rw-r--r--@ 1 markd  markd  135270400 Jul 24 20:38 /Users/markd/junk/SnapshotRepository.sparseimage
	com.apple.diskimages.fsck	       20

Turning off Xcode's "Undo past save" warning (Xcode->General)

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 00:46:58 UTC

For some reason, Xcode thinks that an undo past the last save is something horrible that you need to be warned about. After living with unstable software, cmd-S is a habit, and undoing past it is No Big Deal. Really. Here's how to turn it off:

% defaults write com.apple.Xcode XCShowUndoPastSaveWarning NO