I’m pleased to announce the release of a new macOS app I’ve been working on for a few weeks. Called Sauna, it’s a lightweight app that displays your Steam friends list and notifies you when a friend comes online. Of course, this is all functionality that the Steam client provides but the goal of Sauna is to be a good macOS citizen and to be extremely lightweight.
In iOS 13, NSFetchedResultsController gained support for delivering changes to
its content as a NSDiffableDataSourceSnapshot via. its delegate. The snapshot
contains the contents of the controller and can be used to populate a table or
collection view complete with animations for content updates.
Unfortunately the API has a few issues. The way it’s bridged from Objective-C to Swift makes using it a bit confusing and it doesn’t match all the functionality of the older delegate methods. In this post I’ll document a couple of the issues I’ve run into and how I’ve worked around them.
I published a new project on GitHub today. It’s a screensaver for macOS called Normal. It simply applies a Gaussian blur to the contents of the screen. I wrote it a year ago when I was procrastinating from my dissertation. Go ahead and check it out on GitHub.
I needed a way to present non-modal alerts inside an app I’m working on and
wanted to use a banner system that’s a bit like what Tweetbot1
does. I ended up writing a UIView subclass called BannerView that I’ve open
sourced for anybody to use.
TL;DR: You can’t name a Core Data attribute new* in Objective-C or Swift
because of how automatic reference counting interacts with manual reference
counting. If you do, you’ll crash unreliably when your Core Data stack is
deallocated.
I’ve spent the better part of a day trying to fix this hard to track down bug in
my Core Data stack that was causing a crash. The crash was introduced when I
added a new entity to my object model. The NSManagedObject subclass looked a
little like this: