#swift-hacks

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File operations queue

Rename files during copy and move operations

Set up custom hotkeys for any action

Work with local and network drives

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Show hidden files

Search in ZIP archives

Advanced search with regular expressions

ZIP archives support with compressing, extracting and full access

Bonjour computers

Root Access

Preview multiple types of files incl. binary and hex

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RAR support with extracting, full access and search

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Mount iOS devices

Mount MTP devices

Process viewer

Mount Dropbox account as a drive

Terminal Emulator

FTP Manager

Share Dropbox Links

Themes

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Stay tuned, yours Peter Wood

How are you doing?

Peter Wood here again with some more tips from my development experience in Swift.

What’s to your mind the percentage of Mac applications where NSWindowController and its subclasses are used? Should be high I believe.

But if your application is in Swift and you’d like to use NSWindowController subclass, a surprise is waiting for you: init(window: NSWindow?) is designated initializer, and init(windowNibName: String?) is convenience initializer.

That means: - I cannot override it - I cannot create my own initializer in the subclass and call super.init(windowNibName: “WindowNibName”) in it.

Total nuisance, yeah. What adds to confusion is the initializer generated by Xcode at NSWindowController subclass creation.

init(window: NSWindow?) { super.init(window: window) // Initialization code here. }

As a result, it seems that we cannot call init(windowNibName: “WindowNibName”) at all!

I prefer to use mainly init(windowNibName: String?) to create window controller, and call it either directly or in custom init. But I cannot do this in Swift due to reasons I've stated above.

Is there a way out? Yes! There are even two of them!

1. Get rid of all the constructors in our class. Thus we'll be able to call the required Convenience Initializer of the base class.

var controller = MyWindowController(windowNibName:”MyWindowControllerNib”)

Initialization can be done by windowDidLoad() method in this case.

2. keep the init(window: NSWindow?) constructor generated by Xcode; and override the following methods:

override var windowNibName : String! { return "MyWindowControllerNib" }

The object should be created as follows:

var controller = MyWindowController(window:nil)

In this case, we'll be able to both use the initializer created by Xcode and create our own custom initializers.

UPD: Seems that I've missed a very simple yet obvious method - overriding all designated initializers of the base class.

So here we have the 3rd method: override all the designated initializers, that is, add to your subclass the following:

init() { super.init() } init(window: NSWindow?) { super.init(window: window) // Initialization code here. } init(coder: NSCoder!) { super.init(coder: coder) // Initialization code here. }

Thus we'll be able to call the required Convenience Initializer of the base class.

var controller = MyWindowController(windowNibName:”MyWindowControllerNib”)

It's up to you to decide which method to use.

Stay tuned for more news.

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UPD: creating strong IBOutlet was added

Hey there.

Today I would like to tell you about one more Swift peculiarity, or to be more precise, flaw. It's about creating strong IBOutlet.

In Swift, ordinary variables (var let) are by default strong. IBOutlet, on the contrary, is weak. In most cases it works fine until it comes to declaring IBOutlet as strong reference.

Though it happens quite rare, nevertheless we need sometimes strong IBOutlets, say, in cases like:

IBOutlet for NSTextField

IBOutlet for top level object in iOS app

That's when we find out that Swift cannot do this!

Apple devs have already admitted that this is a bug: "Thanks for the bug report. We're working on a solution for this."

Well, thanks! But we need it NOW!

We've found a workaround by declaring the IBOutlet:

var strongTextView:NSTextView? @IBOutlet var textView: NSTextView { get { return strongTextView } set { strongTextView = newValue } }

Simple but effective. Thanks for staying with us.

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Hello again.

This is our first post out of series dedicated to tips and tricks for Apple's new programming language, Swift. Our workarounds will be mainly for current lacks and bugs in Swift language itself, as well as for some Swift solutions which we find unobvious and clumsy.

Surely, in course of time certain solutions will become out-of-date, as soon as Apple provides fixes and improvements or develops missing features. But today we hope developers using Swift in real projects will find them helpful.

Quite often we need to use third-party frameworks in our projects. Lots of ready-to-use solutions are already written in Objective-C, so there's no sense to wait for their analogs in Swift.

It's really great that Swift permits to use Objective-C code. Today we'll see how to do this.

1. Add bridging header: File->New->File…

Choose Header file.

2. Specify the file name. For example, Swift-Bridging-Header.h

3. Set the file name in target settings in “Objective-C Bridging Header”:

4. Import the required framework into the file: #import <FlashInApp/FlashInApp.h>

That's it! Now we can use Objective-C class of this framework in our Swift project: var rect = NSMakeRect(0, 0, 100, 100) var view = ESFlashView(frame: rect)

PS This can be done via Xcode as well. Just add Objective-C class into the project. Then delete it. Xcode will create bridging header and specify it in the target settings.

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