Thought I'd do #AppleScript support for this one…

#macdev #indiedev #appkit

Indie Mac app developers, how do you take money?

#macdev #indiedev

I love the Marsh Family.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQ67oapo-To

(and if anyone is worried they're anti American, look through their back catalogue, they spend plenty of time calling out other kakistocracies such as the UK.)

Some SF Symbols have usage restrictions from Apple (usually including "may not be modified”). I'm being good, and displaying/honouring the restrictions in my UI.

#macdev #sfsymbols

Showing the 'onion skin' versions of other weights just makes it look like this wheelchair user is going really fast.

#macdev #sfsymbols

As you may know from my recent posts, I'm building a Mac app for creating SF Symbols.

I've made a survey about your experiences using or creating SF Symbols, if anyone fancies giving me some feedback! All questions are optional so feel free to just answer what you like.

https://forms.gle/Gy2iWBxv4Bfx8i4z6

(Obviously, this is aimed at software developers on Apple platforms.)

#macdev #buildinpublic

This evening's #macdev SF Symbols fun: building integration tests that confirm my app's canvas rendering, my preview pipeline (auto-generate a .caf file, load it with NSBundle), and a full actool/asset catalog workflow, all result in identical rendering of a symbol.

Fun includes: trying to work out the size ratio between TextKit's underline and strike through. Work out how the phase of dashed lines is calculated in Core Graphics. And a LOT of baseline calculations.

Yeesh this one has been a bit of an ordeal. But now we have live previews of the symbols you're drawing, actually rendered as SF Symbols via Apple’s code.

This has involved hand crafting a .car file (via reverse engineering what all the bit patterns mean), saving to disk, then loading it back in with NSBundle to then hand to SwiftUI's Image. (This is probably the only bit of SwiftUI that'll be in the app!)

#appkit #swiftui #sfsymbols #buildinpublic #macdev

So, when Apple deprecates NSDrawer and it doesn't support dark mode... build my own!

(Custom NSWindow as a child window, drawing my own chrome.)

#macdev #appkit #buildinpublic

I'm genuinely considering it... except the drawer border doesn't seem to handle dark mode. And I just checked, it's the same for the one remaining drawer in Mail!

While I'm investigating old stuff… turns out that custom bindings in the interface builder inspector still work in Xcode 26, via @IBDesignable and `exposeBinding()`!

#macdev #appkit #cocoabindings

I had forgotten the iWork 09 inspector had an NSDrawer!

Reckon I could get away with one in this day and age? ;)

Vector maths is complicated. I'm trying to expand strokes to paths, but in a way that I can work with them for things like clipping masks, but also output three different weights and still end up with the same number of points on each one.

Currently I'm generating loads of points. I'd like to do it with fewer, but I'm getting stuck trying to meet all the correctness requirements…

Trying to decide about how to manage liquid glass support. Dark mode UI with a light canvas and NSRulers on my scroll view all combine to look fairly janky…

Maybe I should wait and test on Golden Gate before deciding too much.

#macdev #buildinpublic

Showing how your SF Symbol looks next to text. (The symbol is editable, and the text moves with the right hand guide.)

(Precise distance between guide and text will be calibrated later!)

#macdev

What could I be building? #macdev #appkit

TextKit 2 can't have multiple NSTextContainers for one layout manager!

Which… presumably means you can't do printing, or multi-column… this kind of rules it out for the app I'm building now! Guess I'm using TextKit 1 again.

#appkit #macdev #TextKit2

My SVG import is getting pretty good! #macdev

SVG import working on my vector graphics library :D

#macdev

Trying (and so far failing) to find an App Store safe way of getting the SF Symbols vectors with metadata (ie the style of each layer).

I can do it with undocumented APIs, or by cracking the encryption on the font…

#macdev