For simple UIs, IB is a great tool to edit controls and outlets.
If UIs get more complex and contain many bindings, things tend to get opaque. At one side, you edit source code, at the other side, you edit XIBs. Xcode's search feature finds certain names in XIB, but not all. For example, Xcode doesn't find properties of bindings in XIBs.
Thus, I wonder, if better ways to edit UIs exist.
If UIs could be - optionally - specified using XML, one could easily search and replace all occurrences of a given name [or even dynamically generate XML specifications].
I feel Adobe Flex' UI editor - either visual or using the nicely integrated XML-editor - combines both worlds in a good way: The XML-editor is fully aware of defined names and provides a helpful auto-completer.
How should complex UIs be managed using Xcode?
IB has a lot of problems. It's also still the best tool for the job in most cases. (The same can be said of Xcode generally.) As much as possible, keep your nib files simple and avoid really fancy or complex bindings.
If you find cases where Xcode's Refactor...Rename tool does not correctly modify nib files, you should open a bug at bugreport.apple.com.
You always have the option of examining/editing the nib files directly using the command line tools like ibtool. I use it at times to inspect complex bindings.
Beyond the graphical editors, Xcode and even Interface Builder are really just faces for a collection unix command line tools. You can always dig as far under the hood as you wish.
Nib files are just plist files which are just a specific xml schema so you can edit them directly if you wish. However, they are much more complex than Flex files for obvious reasons.
Related
This is likely not a simple topic - I have researched this to the best of my abilities and realize that it is not supported in any typical fashion.
My goal is to enable something similar to .app files from OSX, where the application, as well as its user data, can exist in the same file. I imagine it would require writing a tool to manage this behaviour, but this question is more about how to achieve this in the Windows OS. I am quite flexible regarding the implementation details, but the more straightforward the behaviour, the better (i.e. avoiding copying or compressing/decompressing entire directories/archives at runtime would be ideal).
Approaches I have considered:
Find a way to get explorer to treat a directory as a file, so that it can be associated. I have found a way to get explorer to treat a directory as a control panel item, I have thus far been unable to find a way to use this to associate a custom program. See the infamous "godmode hack" for Windows (name a directory something to the effect of "GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}"). This one seems the most hopeful, but I'm at wits end trying to find information about creating a new association of this type.
Come up with some kind of archive format which can extract executable information to a temporary directory, launch this executable passing the archive as a commandline parameter. This seems like the ugliest solution, from a performance perspective. I would prefer a different solution if at all possible, one which doesn't involve making duplicates of the program or its data to run.
Find a way to associate a directory directly, though I have found no trace of this being supported in Windows, and I assume this is a dead-end.
Find a way to get an executable to include writeable embedded files. I have been unable to make any headway with this- I even tried a resource hacker approach, but obviously you cannot modify the assembly while its in use.
Tried to make a self-modifying JAR file with Java, but the route I took would add the JDK as a runtime requirement, which seems a bit overkill. Even then, it would be limited to Java, and I'm pretty sure it's not actually supposed to allow that in the first place.
Modify Windows Explorer. I shudder at the amount of work this would take, not to mention the at-best gray area it falls under legally. Perhaps there's a way to extend explorer to achieve this, I'm not sure.
A custom archive file. This seems like the most straightforward way to do it. But it would ideally need to be an archive format that has very little overhead for file I/O. Could even be some kind of virtual disk that gets mounted, but I am imagining that would be pretty heavy.
I would appreciate any insight that anyone has on this topic. I won't go into reasons as they are irrelevant to the question itself- I'm aware it is likely not the most practical solution to anything in particular. Consider it a novel pursuit.
It can be done by application virtualization,
Read this wikipedia page theory:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_application
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_virtualization
And two pages about software:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VMware_ThinApp
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_(software)
Windows 7 added the ability for a Desktop.ini file to add/change the folder verbs on a per-folder basis. Using that trick it is possible to create a "folders as applications" style setup.
When I declare elements in the .sdef file for my scriptable application, I have the option to declare various accessors, like this:
<accessor style="id"/>
<accessor style="index"/>
However, I wonder what consequence these declarations have. So far, I could not make out any changes of behavior in my test scripts whether I add or remove accessors for index and id as long as I implement the necessary methods.
So, how do these affect anything? Are they only for documentary purposes, such as what is shown in the dictionary of the Script Editor?
Or does the scripting engine actually behave differently in certain cases depending on these declarations?
So far, I only noticed one behavior that affects them: Script Debugger appears to use them to decide how to browse values in its Explorer. But I doubt Apple added these declarations only for the purpose of this application.
AppleScript does not validate against these settings in your SDEF. However, other tools may. For instance, my Script Debugger application uses this information to control the object access options presented to the user in its Explorer viewers. Various AppleEvent bridges may also use this information to control the kinds of object access they provide to their host scripting languages. An example from the distant past was my JavaScriptOSA project which bridged AppleEvent access into JavaScript. It used the key form settings to control the keys one could use when accessing element objects.
I recently automated the creation of Powerpoint Presentations in a site I'm making. I found the Office Interop libraries extremely simple to use.
Office isn't built for this kind of thing in a webserver environment, so I'm looking at creating the Powerpoints using Open Office XML, only it's so extremely complex. For example I downloaded some code to create a blank presentation with some text. This code was around 300 lines! Using the Office Interop libraries I could do the same thing in just a couple of lines of code.
I don't have time, nor do I want to attempt to learn how to interact with the Open Office XML libraries, so I'm hoping someone has made a wrapper for the Open Office XML libraries. So far all my searching has only given me one result, Aspose Slides for .NET. This looks really hopeful, but it also looks rather expensive
Has anyone ever used a decent wrapper or alternative before?
If you are looking at automating the creation of Powerpoint presentation files, I'd say you continue with OpenXML, there's nothing better than it. Everything else is either paid or don't offer entire gamut of functionality that Open XML can provide.
If you find creating a blank file tedious, you could save an empty file somewhere and use that as a template for performing further operations on it.
The only thing close to a wrapper for PowerPoint I've found is the Open XML PowerTools. It includes a PresentationBuilder class which can be used for some specific tasks like combining slides from multiple PowerPoint documents into a new document. Although its pretty limited in its functionality you could extend the class.
However, I've come to the conclusion that there just is not a good wrapper out there so I've had to do what everybody pretty much recommends and that is using the Open XML SDK Productivity Tool and the Reflect code button.
I put together a basic presentation then Reflect Code and put that into a class. Yes its a lot of lines of code and its not the most elegant solution but it does work. Then from there I can extend or modify that class to do the specific things I need to do with each slide. The Productivity Tool is a big help for figuring out the code need to do specific things. I try to keep it simple and just do one or two things at a time, Reflect Code, then look at the code to see what it does.
You could try SoftArtisans PowerPointWriter, it has a template mode that allows you to start with an existing PowerPoint file with a few place holders, and merge your data with your presentation with as little as 5 lines of code.
Disclaimer: I work for SoftArtisans
I have an existing MFC product and am planning on supporting a couple of other national languages thru the use of resource-only DLLs. I've read a number of articles and tutorials on how to go about this, but admit that I don't have a lot of in-depth knowledge of Windows resources (mostly just use VS 2008's graphical interface).
The major area that I am trying to understand is that it seems like all of the resource source files (i.e., resource.rc) for these DLLs -- and the main program -- should be sharing the same copy of resource.h. After all, all those IDD_xxx values have to be consistent, and it seems like making updates to the resources would be even more complicated by having to keep multiple resource.h files in sync!
So am I correct on this, and does anyone have any tips for how to best implement this? Should I modify resource.rc in the DLL projects to point to the "master" resource.h in the main program directory?
Yes, use the same resource.h file for sure.
One way is to just copy the resources you need to be translated into the the new resource project--stuff like menus, strings, dialogs. Bitmaps and icons probably don't need to be translated unless you put some text on them that is language specific. If you know your localse, at program startup you can call AfxSetResourceHandle() with the resource DLL you manually load.
Another way to approach the problem if you have a multitude of DLLs and EXEs is to use binary resource editing tools. What they do is create token files from your resources. Your translators edit the token file with the binary editing tool. When all is done, you run a tool to apply the translation to the binaries. Basically, you don't distribute resource DLLs, but distribute different versions of your DLLs for each language. The tools are smart enough so that if you make a change like add a string or dialog, it will get picked up and your translator can see that he needs to translate something new. The previously translated work will be saved in the token files. This is how we do it at my shop. We used to use Microsoft's Localization Resource toolkit. I don't know if we still use it or not since it is somebody else's responsibility now.
I found the MSDN article ID 198846 a good starting point for sharing of resources via a dll, though it does need updating for newer versions of visual studio, it was quite easy to follow and understand.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/198846
I'm building an app in Obj-C / Xcode and I'm running into some repetitive tasks. For example if I want to add an image resource to my project I just go through the same identical steps... only difference is the path to the resource.
How can I automate these tasks?
Is there some sort of Xcode macro-recorder like in Photoshop and Excel?
There's definitely no macro recorder, but there are some tools you can use. First, there's Applescript, which is the most likely to be of use for this particular problem. I'm not promising it'll be easy, however. There isn't a rich collection of Applescripts for Xcode that I know of, so you'd need to dig through the Scripting Suite using Script Editor and see what's available.
For text things, there are User Scripts, which you can create from the script menu (it looks like a scroll). You can write perl, python, ruby, or whatever you like to process selected text and turn it into other text.
You can also create text macros (Edit>Insert Text Macro).
Another major repetitive task is setting up your initial project. For that you can create new project templates to be set up as you like them. I have most of a walkthrough of that written up, and should have something posted on Cocoaphony this week or early next as part of my Building the Build System series.