Deploying Mac Apps Outside App Store: How to Remember User Intent for Folders
When a macOS user specifically grants a sandboxed app access to a file/folder outside of that app’s container, that special access only survives until the app is closed. If the user reopens the app and wants to again read...
Using Packages to create an installer for distributing macOS apps outside of the Mac App Store
macOS developers will most likely be faced with the requirement to build an installer for apps they want to — or must — distribute outside of the Mac App Store (MAS). There is also substantial economic incentive to...
Beyond App Sandbox: Going outside of the macOS app container
Did you know that a macOS app can read and write outside of its container when sandboxed? Did you know that a non-sandboxed macOS app has no container? Were you aware that you can sell and distribute non-sandboxed macOS apps...
Beyond the Sandbox: Signing and distributing macOS apps outside of the Mac App Store
Since the advent of OS X Mojave and especially Catalina and the requirement for app notarization, some of us old-time macOS developers are concerned that Apple will pull the plug on the apps that we distribute ourselves. Many of...
macOS Tutorial: Developing a Document based App
Welcome to another macOS tutorial! In this post we are about to learn how to create a macOS application that belongs to a unique category of apps; a category that is quite common but also quite important, and contains a large...
Implementing Drag And Drop Operations Using NSPasteboard on macOS
One of the most common operations macOS users perform and they are quite familiar with is drag and drop. On a daily basis we all drag things around when working on our Macs. We drag files, text, images, and many, many more....
Creating Status Bar Apps on macOS in Swift
Hello readers! I’d like to start today by saying that this is a macOS programming tutorial that I wanted to write for a long time now. Not only because it’s extremely interesting, but also because we are going to meet...
The Complete Guide to NSOutlineView in macOS Programming
Welcome to a new tutorial where we are going to unfold another cool topic on macOS programming. Today we are going to meet an important control, really useful for displaying hiearchical data, the outline view. Outline view...
macOS Programming: Using Menus and the Toolbar
Another macOS programming tutorial is here, and today we’re going to talk about a really interesting topic: Menus. Every macOS developer has to know about how to deal with menus, as they consist of a fundamental part on...
macOS Programming Tutorial: Working with Collection View
Welcome to a new macOS tutorial! In previous posts we talked about table views and outline views as means to display collections of data in a structured way. Both present quite common behaviour and they’re close to the way...