Another semi-useless spot on the web…
Posted in Main on Apr 23rd, 2008
It seems to be a recurring topic here on my blog, threading. I was asked to look at a problem for a client yesterday and discovered a very subtle threading issuing (I actually didn’t create it, one of the other people on the project created the problem when he added some code). Basically in order [...]
Posted in Main on Apr 5th, 2008
I had a user send me email the other day indicating that his copy of ReceiptWallet was already registered and he couldn’t enter his newly purchased registration code. He sent me a screenshot of the about box which shows the registration code and I ran the code through my database to discover a) it was [...]
Posted in Main on Apr 3rd, 2008
I find that a majority of the crash reports that come in for ReceiptWallet have the following for the description:
Yes, they are blank! While I appreciate people sending in crash reports (I read everyone of them and try to figure out the problem), having no description makes it much harder to figure out the problem. [...]
Posted in Main on Mar 30th, 2008
Thanks to Jim Correia of Bare Bones Software, I have a slightly different method for filtering NSTextFields based on an NSFormatter. While my older method worked, this is a bit cleaner.
Like my old filter, this also has three methods:
- (void) setAcceptableCharacterSet:(NSCharacterSet *) inCharacterSet;
- (void) setMaximumLength:(int) inLength;
- (void) setMaximumValue:(int) inValue;
However, they’re called differently. You’d do something [...]
Posted in Main on Mar 29th, 2008
I love Cocoa, but it seems that some simple things are missing. For example, NSTextField doesn’t have the ability to filter text input as the user is typing. A friend reminded me that this is a feature that PowerPlant had ages ago. Cocoa has NSFormatters which allow the field to be validated after text is [...]
Posted in Main on Mar 24th, 2008
In my ongoing saga with PDFKit, a user had a crash that I couldn’t reproduce and generously sent me the PDF that caused the issue. I was immediately able to reproduce the problem and furthermore, managed to get Preview to crash on that PDF. The crash was occurring when I tried to generate the thumbnail [...]
Posted in Main on Mar 22nd, 2008
Anyone I know that really has a clue avoids multi-threading programming (except for some server applications) as there are so many gotchas. Making things thread safe sounds easy, but is extremely hard as it is quite easy to overlook an item or two I got bit by this in ReceiptWallet in 2 spots. In one [...]
Posted in Main on Mar 20th, 2008
In tracking down a bug in ReceiptWallet, I discovered some end (at least to me) odd behavior. ReceiptWallet is an NSDocument based application. When the document is closed, is should call dealloc to release its memory. This wasn’t happening. It appears that some things in my code prevented dealloc from being called; I had [...]
Posted in Main on Mar 20th, 2008
One of the toughest parts of my job is tracking down bugs that either I create, are operating system bugs, or are a combination. Most of the bug reports I get are extremely incomplete and don’t help me. I also get crash reports sent to me so that I can try to see the problems. [...]
Posted in Main on Mar 18th, 2008
In today’s world of consumer software, the phrase “software is never done, it’s just shipped” is the norm. Prior to the wide use of the Internet and downloadable updates, this wasn’t always the case. When it cost real money to send out updates on media, software was tested more, but also people didn’t expect updates [...]
