The Rules
  • Feel free to leave constructive criticism, or point out a better way to do something.
  • Personal attacks or flames, on me or anyone else, will be deleted.
  • Past history has shown that 99% of comments I can't read (i.e. those in other languages) to be spam. Therefore, any comment I can't read will be removed.
  • I'm pretty mellow concerning profanity, but excessive (as determined subjectively by me), bad language will be removed.

Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Here's a handy little tool I've used often...

Problem: In several applications, I've found the need to pop up an alert/message window telling the application user that something went wrong, or that something they did wasn't kosher.

Solution: NSRunAlertPanel. Little macros like this one are additional reasons I love programming for the Mac. But to make it a little more useful, I created a method call that makes a dummy alert with an ok button and a given message. It looks like this:



-(void) displayAlert:(NSString*) alertMsg {
NSRunAlertPanel(@"Alert", alertMsg, @"OK", nil, nil);
}


The actual NSRunAlertPanel macro signature looks like this:


NSRunAlertPanel(NSString *title,
NSString *msgFormat,
NSString *defaultButton,
NSString *alternateButton,
NSString *otherButton)


Other parameters can be added to the method signature to create more full-featured alerts. I created the method solely to remove the NSRunAlertPanel call (which can be a big method call) from the logic of what I'm doing at the moment and replace it with a short method call that does what I want it to.

Sunday, October 26, 2008

Publishing a Bonjour networking service with NSNetService

So I'm working on an undisclosed (but totally awesome) iPhone/iPod Touch app for CS 598R (a capstone/senior project class), and have developed the following procedure for publishing a Bonjour service. I'm posting it here so I can always know where to find code that does what I want.

Feel free to use the code, just don't blame me if it doesn't do what you want it to...

You can see the basic sample code here, or on the BYU CocoaHeads site here.