Since I've already tried the write-a-book thing before, and I know I suck at it, I'm opting for the "blog entry a day" thing... which actually means more like "blog entry a week". I know that sounds bad, but when you consider how often I've been blogging, it's a vast improvement, so...

To get down to it, maybe it's more like I hate Interface Builder... but not really. It's just that I have not yet "become one" with my tool, and we have these little spats from time to time.

I've been fighting with an Array Controller in IB, because it has no bindings listed. If you know IB and Array Controllers, you will know why that is wrong/bad. I can't bind any content into my array, and that's a big problem. I finally noticed that the icon for my bad array controller didn't look like the icon for a different, working array controller. This was a key breakthrough. And I finally figured out what I did wrong. When I added the array controller to my XIB file, I dragged in a plain old Object, and then changed the class to be my custom NoiseArrayController. That was it. What I shoulda done - drag in a generic ArrayController object, and then change IT to be my custom class.

Simple error. Hours of frustration. So, if an Array Controller in your XIB file doesn't have any bindings, maybe you did what I did. You have to get rid of it and start over with the correct base NSArrayController. Then you'll be rockin. Sigh.

File this one under useful snippets for Mac Cocoa development. How to extract the application version number out of your app's info.plist file.

You are writing a Mac Cocoa application, and you know you want to store your user specific application support files in a predictable location, like ~/Library/Application Support/<Application>/. So... how exactly do we do that?

Once again, Google to the rescue, and we find the answer at Cocoa Dev Central. This will not only construct the file name for you, but it will create the directory if it doesn't exist, too.

- (NSString *) pathForDataFile { 
    NSFileManager *fileManager = [NSFileManager defaultManager]; 

    NSString *folder = @"~/Library/Application Support/MyApplication/"; 
    folder = [folder stringByExpandingTildeInPath]; 

    if ([fileManager fileExistsAtPath: folder] == NO) { 
        [fileManager createDirectoryAtPath:folder attributes: nil]; 
    }

    NSString *fileName = @"MyApplication.mysettings"; 
    return [folder stringByAppendingPathComponent: fileName];
} 

Again, an example that just works. I'm on a roll today.

I was struggling with my Photoshop plugin again. The plugin window is modal. But then I need to pop up a modal window, in order to prompt the user for new name/description for the user-saved presets. I was puzzling and Googling, and then I stumbled across a reference to "sheets". Bingo!

This page has the best little example of sheet usage. I was able to copy/paste and then a couple of tweaks, and a couple IB bindings and it all just worked.

- (IBAction)openSheet:(id)sender
{
	[NSApp beginSheet: theSheet
			modalForWindow: theParent
			modalDelegate: self
			didEndSelector: @selector(sheetDidEnd: returnCode: contextInfo:)
			contextInfo:NULL];
}

- (IBAction)theSheetOK:(id)sender
{
	[NSApp endSheet:theSheet returnCode: NSOKButton];
	[theSheet orderOut:nil];
}

- (IBAction)theSheetCancel:(id)sender
{
	[NSApp endSheet:theSheet returnCode: NSCancelButton];
	[theSheet orderOut:nil];
}

- (void)sheetDidEnd:(NSWindow *)sheet returnCode:(int)returnCode contextInfo:(void *)contextInfo
{
	if (returnCode == NSOKButton)
		NSBeep();
}

I really love code examples that just work.

Cocoa-in-Carbon application. Note to self. Do NOT "freeze-dry" a controller object in your NIB file, especially if your controller object opens your NIB file in it's init method.

Just sayin.

Get Your Cyborg Name

Parallels provides a nice tool for resizing the file you have chosen as your hard drive for your virtual machine, called the Parallels Image Tool. Unfortunately, Windows is not quite so cooperative, and will not just recognize the resized file as a larger HDD automagically. You need to resize your partition, and Windows doesn't provide any easy ways of doing this.

Googling for a solution, I discovered this very detailed example using Gparted - the Gnome Partion Editor Tool with Parallels. Unfortunately, it is old, and when I tried it the Gparted image refused to boot cleanly, with some sort of error on ... mouse detection, I think. You should just go directly to the Gparted project at SourceForge, and find the most recent stable ISO file to download. While booting, most of the instructions from uneasysilence no longer apply to the new version of Gparted, but I just went with the defaults, and it all worked. Once GParted is up and running, then the instructions from uneasysilence are useful again.

I don't really blog that often. Even when I was going at full tilt, I rarely posted more than 10-12 times a month. So... I don't care about the pagination plugin anymore. I especially don't care when it involves 3 inter-related plugins, at different/conflicting versions!

So I took the easy way out, I'm afraid. Googling for alternatives, I discovered this example pastie, which gives me the month-by-month archive in the sidebar you see now.

See? Who needs pagination?