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.
Unread lets a user save articles and links directly to Safari Reading List, without going through the share sheet. This is a popular feature, but there are unfortunate limitations on both iOS and macOS.
iOS
On iOS, SSReadingList lets an app save a webpage URL to Safari Reading List. This initially worked well. But in iOS 13.4 a confirmation dialog was added. Every time an app saves a webpage URL to Safari Reading List, the system displays an alert asking the user for permission.
I assume this is intended to prevent rogue apps from filling a user’s Safari Reading List with junk. But there needs to be a way for a user to indicate that they trust an app to write to Safari Reading List without being prompted every time.
I filed FB7573628 in February 2020 (over four years ago) requesting this.
Honestly if the alert had existed when I first added the ability to save an article to Safari Reading List, I would not have added this functionality to Unread. The alerts are obnoxious.
macOS
SSReadingList is not available to macOS apps, but an Add to Safari Reading List Sharing Service can save a webpage URL to Safari Reading List. On macOS this has the side effect of Safari coming to the foreground. The user experience would be much better if Safari stayed in the background. I filed FB13682568 with a sample project requesting this.
Apple could make the experience of saving to Safari Reading List from an app much better by addressing these issues. I hope that they will.
On iOS Unread has a Mail Content article action. This lets customers quickly compose an email with the HTML content of an article. It uses MFMailComposeViewController. MFMailComposeViewController has the unfortunate limitation of only working with Apple Mail, but it is otherwise great. The Mail Content article action is popular with my customers.
macOS has a Compose Email Sharing Service, making it easy for an app to ask the system to create an email message with a recipient, subject, and message body. I was excited to find that this service works with the user’s default email client. It is not limited to Apple Mail.
The Compose Email Sharing Service can accept either a plain text string, or an attributed string with formatting and embedded images.
But after spending more time working with the Compose Email Sharing Service, I was disappointed by some of its weaknesses.
Bugs Around Embedded Images
When sharing articles as rich text, I found that embedded images often get moved to the end of the article. I was able to generate a simple test case – an attributed string with an embedded image at the beginning of it. If I share that attributed string with the sharing service, Apple Mail will generate a message with the image moved to the end. I filed FB13668576 documenting this.
Plain Text Messages
If Apple Mail’s Message format setting (under the Composing pane of the Apple Mail settings window) is set to Plain Text, outgoing messages created using the sharing service are converted to plain text. All formatting and embedded images are lost. Arguably that is the correct behavior because it honors the user’s message format setting.
However a bigger problem is that there is no spacing between paragraphs. The resulting message for a multi-paragraph article is a wall of text. If Unread had a way to determine whether Apple Mail’s message format setting was plain text, Unread could add its own blank lines between paragraphs. But since I cannot find a way to get that information from a sandboxed Mac app, I can either share an attributed string with formatting and embedded images or I can share a plain text string with my own Markdown-like formatting. I cannot do both.
Third Party Email Apps
When the user’s default email client is something other than Apple Mail and an app sends an attributed string, the email client just gets the plain text. The plain text version of the string will also lack basic plain text formatting such as blank lines between paragraphs.
Scripting Apple Mail Directly
I considered trying to send an Apple Event to Apple Mail, hoping that I could simply tell Apple Mail to create an outbound email message with specific HTML content. However the sdef for Apple Mail states that setting the html content attribute of an outgoing message has no effect. The setting is deprecated. My testing confirms that setting that attribute has no effect.
Feedback Reports
I filed these feedback reports
FB13668659: .composeEmail NSSharingService - Multiple paragraphs, Plain Text Message Format
FB13669961: Formatting lost when sharing multi-paragraph attributed strings to third party email clients via the .composeEmail NSSharingService
FB13668576: When creating an email using the .composeEmail NSSharingService using an attributedString, images are moved to the bottom of the message
Related Performance Tip
I find using NSWorkspace.shared.open(URL) with a mailto: URL instead of the Compose Email Sharing Service to be about twice as fast for sending plain text email.
The Supreme Court must really be backlogged if they cannot hear the presidential immunity case until the end of April. President Biden should appoint a few additional Supreme Court justices to give them the capacity they need.
At this evening’s CocoaHeads Boston meeting on Zoom, Ed Arenberg will discuss his experiences developing on the Vision Pro and show his game “Connect3D - Spatial” running on-device. New folks and folks from outside the Boston area are always welcome.
I have a bunch of loose markdown files in a version-controlled folder that I consider my “company wiki”. Making it navigable with a web browser and letting documents link to each other would be a significant improvement.
CocoaHeads Boston will meet Thursday evening via Zoom at 7:00 PM Boston time. New participants and participants from outside the Boston area are always welcome.
I am now posting to my blog, and automatically cross-posting to Mastodon. The best way to follow or reach me via Mastodon (or Mastodon-compatible) service is @johnbrayton@iosdev.space. You can also follow my posts via my blog and its RSS feed.
