Creating a macOS document based app with SwiftUI and the new App protocol

Have you already tried to create a macOS document based app with SwiftUI and the new App protocol? Well, there are some problems to solve esp. if you want to use menus focused on the currently open document.

In the old app cycle with AppDelegate / SceneDelegate you still had to use the storyboard to define the menu items and link them to your methods in your document class derived from NSDocument. Enabling and disabling of the menu item according to the open documents was automatically managed by the frameworks.

That’s not the case in the new App protocol of SwiftUI anymore. Instead, you can define your menus and menu items quite nicely in your App struct conforming to the new App protocol but there is no automatic link to the current document in focus.

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SwiftUI Previews: 5s Update Error

Currently, I am developing a quite complex Mac application using Core Data together with SwiftUI. The first challenge I encountered was the SwiftUI preview. I implemented a special preview model with some test data that is assigned to the preview structs of my views as EnvironmentObject. That works fine and I enriched my application step by step.

Well, but suddenly the previews stopped to work. I always got the error message „Updating took more than 5 seconds.“ I suspected one of the recent changes to screw up my work although the completely built applications still worked fine. I walked through my code and certainly found some problematic points but nothing could make the preview show up again.

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Call Center Simulation – Influence of Call Durations Distribution on Statistical Results

Recently I’ve refurbished an old project of mine, the Call Center Simulator CCsim (https://apps.apple.com/de/app/ccsim/id1519438028?mt=12). It was a lot of fun to develop this heavy multithreading app. One main reason for me at the very beginning was to see how big the influence of the actual shape of distributions (e.g. for the call duration) besides the mean value is on the results. Now we do have this tool and we can play around a little bit.

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Performance of a Heavy Multithreading App on Apple Silicon

I couldn’t resist. Now, the new Apple Silicon macs are out and I had to buy a new Mac mini to test my applications on the new architecture (and the new macOS 11.0). Recently I released my refurbished project, the call center simulator CCsim (https://apps.apple.com/de/app/ccsim/id1519438028?mt=12). It is heavily relying on multithreading and I was eager to see what it is doing on M1-equipped macs. Weiterlesen

Display portrait and landscape format picture in equal size using a video projector

Do you also feel that this is the big disadvantage of modern picture projection compared to the old-fashioned slides: portrait format is really handicaped because you have two big black bars on the left and right hand sides. Video projectors have an aspect ratio of 4:3 or even 16:9 compared to the squared display size of old slide projectors. Weiterlesen