Some believe that the election results indicate a severe weakness in the Democratic party or of Kamala Harris’ Presidential campaign. I wish I agreed, but the problem is bigger than that.
The danger of Trump seemed clear in 2016, but that danger has become much more apparent since that time. We had the Russia scandal, the Comey firing, the extortion of Ukraine, the COVID response, the insurrection, the stolen classified documents, and the Madison Square Garden hate rally. I could go on.
Despite all of that, this is the third Presidential election in which Trump got over 45% of the popular vote. Against three very different candidates. No primary challenger came close to defeating Trump either.
Voters know what they are getting with Trump. Roughly half the country wants an illiterate hate-mongering insurrectionist dictator as President.
On both iOS and macOS, if you share an item via the share sheet or share popover to Reminders, Unread will offer to create a reminder. Interestingly, if the window or view offering the item has a current NSUserActivity, the default reminder title will be the title of that current NSUserActivity.
Long press that link on iOS, or right click that link on macOS.
Choose “Share…” from the resulting context menu.
Choose “Reminders” from the share sheet or share popover.
Expected result: If the reminder has a default title, it would be “New Reminder”, “Feedly”, or “Feedly: Track the topics and trends that matter to you” (the title of the linked page).
Actual result: The default title is “Unread: An RSS Reader” – the title of the page with the link.
I filed this as FB15271013, along with a sample project demonstrating that the title is coming from the NSUserActivity. The sample project has a UIActivityItemSource that offers better titles in its subjectForActivityType function and its activityViewControllerLinkMetadata function.
On iOS 18, saving an article to Safari Reading List (via the SSReadingList API) sometimes just does nothing. The user does not even get the alert prompting for permission to add a URL to Safari Reading List. The API call returns without throwing an exception. I filed FB15190050 with more info.
Tuesday is election day here in Massachusetts. An added benefit to voting now is the assurance that your voter registration is in good order for the November election.
This is a good article by Jason Snell about macOS permissions checking being out of balance. The excessive permission checking is probably the most frustrating aspect of using a Mac.
I released Unread for Mac! Unread is an RSS reader with beautiful typography, color themes, and more. Unread has a long history on iPhone and iPad, and is now also available for Mac.
iOS 18 lets each app supply a light mode, dark mode, and tinted version of its icon. iOS also allows an app to let a user choose an alternate icon – letting customers personalize how an app appears on their home screen. While both capabilities are great, this combination of features does not appear to mix well.
If an app has several icon options that vary only by color combination, it seems natural to let the user choose one option for light mode and another for dark mode. But there is no way to do this without providing n2 app icon entries in the asset catalog. It also seems like the tinted icon should be the same for each option when they only vary by color combination. But the only way for several icon options to use the same tinted variant is to copy the same PNG into each app icon asset catalog entry.
My ideal solution to this would be a new setAlternateIconName method on UIApplication that accepted 3 different parameters: a light mode icon name, a dark mode icon name, and a tinted icon name. Alternatively a setAlternateIconNameForDarkMode method and a setAlternateIconNameForTinted method could work. I filed FB13999626 requesting this.
For context, this is Unread’s screen letting the user choose an alternate icon. There are 32 different options that vary only by color scheme. I ideally want to let the user choose one for light mode and one for dark mode, and have the tinted variation be the same regardless.
CocoaHeads Boston will meet via Zoom tomorrow (Thursday) evening at 7:00 PM Boston time. New participants and participants from outside the Boston area are always welcome.
www.meetup.com/cocoahead…
As soon as the new beta of macOS is out, I want to install it and use it as much as possible. But I also want my Sonoma installation to remain intact with my data – as a fallback, and because we will probably be unable to submit Mac apps from the beta to App Store Connect.
It took me some time to determine how to set this up. I ended up doing this:
Create a new APFS volume.
Download the Sonoma installer from the Mac App Store.
Install Sonoma on the new volume.
Boot into the new volume, and use Migration Assistant to copy my data from the other volume.
I now have a “Sonoma” volume and a “macos2024” volume.
I am seeing what I believe to be an interesting bug on macOS 14.5 (23F79).
If you have an NSTableView with a context menu, opening that context menu via right click while the app is in the background and then clicking elsewhere in the table view to dismiss the context menu brings the window to the foreground (as expected). However the table view will not respond to any clicks until the app is moved to the background and brought back into the foreground.
I see this behavior in Apple Mail, the Finder, and in other apps including my own. To reproduce this:
Check out this sample app using git clone https://github.com/jbrayton/ActivateBug.git. Observe that it creates a simple NSTableView with three rows. Run the app.
Click the table view rows. Observe that they can be selected by clicking them as you would expect. Right-click in the table view and observe that you get a context menu.
Open Safari. Keep the two windows next two each other on the same screen. Make Safari the active app.
Right-click in the table view of the sample app.
Dismiss the resulting context menu by clicking elsewhere in the table view.
Try to select other rows by clicking them.
Expected result: I would expect clicking a table row to select it.
Actual result: Clicking in the table view has no effect.
Possibly related: If the NSApplicationDelegate has an applicationDidBecomeActive method, I would expect it to be called when bringing an app to the foreground following these steps. It is not.
This video demonstrates the issue with my sample app:
This video demonstrates the issue using Apple Mail:
I filed this as FB13806870.
I can think of a couple possible workarounds, but neither is great:
Similarly create a local NSEvent monitor for .rightMouseDown events that simply ignores right clicks by returning nil when the app is in the background. But that would result in context menus simply being unavailable when the app is in the background.
NSHappyHour will meet at The Lobster Shanty in Salem MA at 6:30 PM Wednesday. New folks are always welcome. Thanks to Geoff Bradford for organizing it.
