Phil's Blog

Toolbar customization is a staple of a true Mac app with any amount of complex functionality.

The AppKit Debug menu is a debugging tool that has been shipping as part of the framework and hence macOS itself for a few years.

In my previous post, In-Process Animations and Transitions with CADisplayLink, Done Right, I outlined some of the use cases for implementing custom animations, as well as how to use CADisplayLink to help you drive the animations you create.

With the introduction of the Swift-native AttributedString in iOS 15 and macOS 12, it’s become pretty common to convert between the existing NSAttributedString and the new type.

I have already written about another gnarly bug around document-based apps in SwiftUI in a previous post.

Okay, forgive me for the attention grabbing title; evil is a pretty harsh term and doesn’t quite convey the nuance.

When it comes to writing good user interface code, and code in general, it’s not exactly groundbreaking to claim that in any given situation, we should strive to use the right tool for the right job.

SwiftUI undoubtedly has a lot of impressive capabilities and features, but unfortunately transparency is not one of them.

macOS 14 and iOS 17 saw the introduction of the Observation framework and the Observable macro, allowing your SwiftUI views to automatically update in response to underlying data changing.

Admittedly, in-process animation and transition techniques on macOS are not as widely applied or evolved as they may be on iOS and iOS-derived platforms, and information and advice around them can be scattered and oftentimes outdated.

TL;DR: As a result of a gnarly regression, every document-based SwiftUI app on visionOS 2.4 is duplicating views, rendering document-based app completely unusable on the platform.

While working on a behavior that required dynamically switching between the nonactivating panel behavior and one that is more similar to the regular window behavior, I discovered a subtle but significant issue in AppKit: changing the NSWindowStyleMaskNona…

At this point, AppKit developers with their finger on the pulse may be familiar with setting subtitles on NSMenuItem using the subtitle property, which has been available since macOS 14.4.

Early Macintosh computers have played a huge role not just in personal computing in general, but in core areas like UI design and systems and framework engineering.

Swift 6 language mode promises compile-time stricter concurrency checking, aimed at preventing and eliminating data races, runtime memory corruption, as well as other common but hard to debug issues.