Need to display a busy window on max with spinner - macos

I'm a new Mac programmer writing my first mac app, actually porting an existing iOS app to MAC.
The app does a lot of remote communication, so when the user kicks off an operation, I want to display a busy window (or message box, or NSAlert maybe), until the operation is completed, then dismiss it programmatically, or the user can click cancel to stop it.
The busy window prevents the user from doing anything until that operation is completed.
The busy window should have a progress spinner, some text, and a cancel button.
Its such a simple thing yet I'm having problems with it because I dont really know MAC programming, getting myself frustrated.
Can anybody offer suggestions, or already written code for it. I hope some code for this already exists because I cant believe I'm the only person in the world who needs things kind of busy window.
Thanks for any help.

You mean something like this:
http://www.developers-life.com/example-nspanel-with-nsprogressindicator.html
???
Source code is available, too (link at the end of the article).
You can just modify the NSPanel in Xcode and add a "Cancel" button that you connect to your cancel action.

Related

MFC: GUI freezes, but keeps working

I’ve encountered a problem I can’t solve.
I’m working on a project with MFC in Visual Studio. The problem is, sometimes GUI just stop visibly reacting, but technically it keeps doing the functions it was intended to do. It means, when I press a button, the function OnBnXXXPressed is executing, but the button doesn’t look like it was pressed, as if I’ve pressed on a picture of button, not the button itself. And it’s not just this button — every other element of GUI seems to keep working, but doesn’t show that it is working.
Also, in this state dialog windows don’t show up upon their call. If I call AfxMessageBox, the message box won’t show up, and the thread that called this function, will not be blocked; AfxMessageBox will basically be skipped.
I have absolutely no idea what can possibly cause that behavior. The question is: what should be happening in program for it to behave this way? Especially if it’s built with MFC?
The project consists of 50+ files, and every function responsible for GUI makes changes to the elements it is about. I do not know where the error is, and I ask you, to the very least, where should I look for it.
Thank you for attention!
The answer was originally provided in the comment section. My code indeed has a GDI resource leak that was provoking this behavior.
When a button is clicked, are you doing a bunch of processing, or do you return fast? If you don't return, maybe locking the UI thread. After a user presses on the button, how long is it taking before the OnClick for that finishes running?
If that's it, here's some more info: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/Win7AppQual/preventing-hangs-in-windows-applications
The solution I've generally used for long-running logic on a UI click is to run it a background thread.

Getting memory leaks from Appcelerator Alloy app

I have an Alloy app. It has got 7 windows and opens at same time. When user close a opened window $.removeListener(); $.destroy(); codes runs at window close event. But I am getting memory leaks on Android device. %90 windows has got ListView, every window has got max 2 Listview. What is the right approach for multiple windows?
First of all, why you would want to open 7 windows at same time when user can only see max 1 window at a time.
It's dead simple, open only that window which user should see first, & create a link-flow to other window in previous window.
Can you think of any app on Play Store which does so, if you have, then please send me its link, I would really love to review it?
But if you mean to say that user will see all windows at same time in a scrolling behaviour or like paging, then go to Ti.UI.TabGroup
Are you 100% sure that your event listeners are being removed?
I don't know the function $.removeListener(); is this a custom function?
As a general rule I try and put as many of my event listeners into the xml, as these are automatically removed, and have a custom function destroyMe() that runs onClose which removes any other listeners that I may have used and $.destroy()
Ti.App.addEventListener is a killer too, make sure these are removed if you use them!
ps: i totally understand the 7 windows bit :-)

Status Item blocking the main thread (NSMenu blocking NSSpeechRecognizer from detecting sound)

I have a NSMenu coming down under a NSStatusItem. I also have a NSSpeechRecognizer. When the NSMenu is open, the speech recognizer does not function properly. It will constantly show that it's receiving sound, until I close the menu. I need it to detect sound properly even while the menu is open.
How can I make the speech recognizer detect sound even while the menu is open? Does it need to become a "first responder" and take precedence over the menu?
I tried setting [speechRecognizer setListensInForegroundOnly: NO] and it still won't work.
If you don't understand, I am more than happy to provide clarification.
Here are some similar situations, but I don't yet fully understand.
The problem is most likely that the menu is running a modal run loop as long as it is open (for the purposes of tracking the mouse, etc...) and this is blocking the NSSpeechRecognizer's ability to function normally.
You can confirm this by bringing up the menu and then pausing into the debugger. You'll likely see two run loops; the outer, normal, one and one deeper down the stack that is running the modal loop.
In general, this is kind of an odd thing to do from a user interaction perspective. The whole point of a pop-up menu is to offer the user some commands that will be done after the corresponding menu item is selected.
If you really need "click this thing and recognize voice", I'd recommend a button that, maybe, pops up a bit of UI and then interacts with the speech recognizer without using a menu?

Why does my Windows app get focus when by rules it should not?

By now everyone writing for Windows probably knows that applications cannot (officially) steal focus from foreground processes, and why. But I have just managed to steal focus, inadvertently, and don't understand how this is even possible.
I have a Delphi app that user brings up with a hotkey (or by a mouse click, or by Alt+Tab), selects a piece of text and hits Enter. My app then minimizes (hides to the tray, even), and pastes the text user just selected into the active window. Nothing new here, plenty of similar projects out there - clipboard extenders, glossaries, macro programs, etc.
What is puzzling to me is that after doing all the above and then sleeping for 1500 ms, I restore my main form and it gets the focus back! It becomes the foreground window, even though it wasn't 1500 ms ago (tested; Windows 7 32-bit.).
In fact, I don't want this at all, so before restoring my main form I record which window has foreground and I give it back to that window after it's been given to me. I'm just curious why my app gets to be in the foreground when by rules it should not. Maybe I don't understand the rules as fully as I thought I did?
If you look at the documentation for SetForegroundWindow you see a list of conditions for the call to succeed, one of them is "The process received the last input event." So if the user does not do anything after pressing enter in your app you still have the right to steal focus. I don't know if Delphi calls SetForegroundWindow for you when the window is restored but it might be something to look into.
I don't know how you restore your window but using SW_SHOWNOACTIVATE with ShowWindow might help...

wp7-how to make a thread navigate pages

I want to check for changes in the aplication state every time interval, and if it has changed, to open a window, and give the user 10 seconds to press on the window, if he does press on the window, then to allow him to navigate freely in the window, and if he doesn't press, to return back to the window before. I thought to implement it with a thread running in the background and waking up every time interval I want. Maybe there is a better way?
This strikes me as a scenario with lots of potential issues.
How do you stop the "window" appearing at an inconvenient time to the user? (e.g. when they were just about to tap on som.ething)
Why not just raise the notification when the state actually changes? This way you wouldn't need to poll.
What is the "Window" you are displaying? How does it differ from the page it is replacing? Is this a popup or are you actually navigating to a different page?
What is the state that's changing? How is it changing without user interaction?
Can't you notify the user of the state change without a potentially intrusive display of a new "window"?
I agree with #matt-lacey, this could be dangerous and might result in a bad user experience.
With that said, this might work
Deployment.Current.Dispatcher.BeginInvoke(() =>
{
//navigation code here
});
I didn't know you could do a pop-up window, could you elaborate?
I've made a thread that is running at the background and making some work, if it decides that a change is necessary, I want to give the user a chance to react to it, or ignore it.
I'm pretty new to this, so if there is a better way than to navigate to a different page i would love to hear it.
Thanks.
It sounds to me like you want to notify the user that something has happened/changed and give them the option to do something about it, which is exactly what "toast" notifcations are all about. They pop up at the top of the screen to inform the user, and then the user can tap that toast to do something, e.g. when WiFi networks are available, you tap the toast to select an available network.
The Silverlight Windows Phone Toolkit includes the ToastRequestTrigger that you use to display toast notifications. The Windows Phone Developer Guide from the patterns & practices team gives examples of using the ToastRequestTrigger. You will need to implement the tap handling yourself in the toast content, but this should be simple enough.

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