Category Archives: Cocoa

NSToolbar basics

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Building a Cocoa based user interface using the Interface Builder is really easy and produces great results quickly. But when I wanted to add a toolbar to a window, I had to realize, that Interface Builder does not support toolbars. So I started reading the apple developer documentation regarding the NSToolbar class and found out that it is actually easy to work with toolbars. There is just no Interface Builder support for them. So here comes a small howto about NSToolbar and its use in your applications.

Cocoa works with distinct toolbar identifiers to distinguish between multiple different toolbars in one application. The toolbars can be fully customized by the user and changes to a toolbar are synchronized to all toolbars with the same identifier. For example in an application with multiple edit document windows, all these windows would have a toolbar with the same identifier. If a user would change on toolbar, alle currently opened edit windows would synchronize their toolbars to the new changes.

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Cocoa memory management 101

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Ok, so here it comes, my first Cocoa posting. I am pretty new to Cocoa and therefore this might be something you are more than familiar with, but for me it is handy to have a quick reference written down where I can look up things. So today I would like to talk about memory management. My coding background lies about 70% in Java, 20% in PHP and 10% in C/C++. So in the past mostly I did not have to worry about memory management topics, although I am familiar with the low level C/C++ way of allocating and releasing memory. Cocoa uses an approach somehow in the middle between automatic garbage collection and manual management. Once you get used to it, it is a very powerful tool and you have a much better control over the memory consumption in your applications than in Java while being less error prone than the C/C++ mechanism.

If you want to dive into the details of Cocoa memory management, I recommend you read the Memory management Programming Guide For Cocoa from Apple. For me it was the main source of information about this topic.

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