Man Reader 2

Several years after I started planning it, Man Reader version 2 is now available. This is a major update with a completely new, modern, user interface and it’s available from the Mac App Store.

Man Reader is a utility app for reading macOS’s man pages. Man Reader allows quick, convenient and easy access to the man pages on your system, useful for programmers, system administrators and tweakers.

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SwiftUI Data Flow 2023

SwiftUI is a reactive framework where the data drives the UI. In 2019, I wrote a post detailing how I manage the various forms of data flow through a SwiftUI app, and with the help of others in the community, I iterated over this until I had a good understanding of the concepts and which methods you should use when. In 2021, I updated the post to cover the minor changes, but there have been no major modifications since then.

At WWDC 2023, things changed a lot! With the introduction of Swift macros, the SwiftUI team was able to reduce the number of property wrappers need to send data around, and remove a lot of boilerplate code.

For this article, I have re-written my sample app as a Mac app and updated it to use the new data macros.

Updated 10th July 2023 to cover changes in version 3 of all the betas.

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macOS Apprentice

I’ve written another book! This one is for people who want to get started in macOS development and here it is: macOS Apprentice, published by kodeco.com (formerly raywenderlich.com).

If you’re a beginner or near-beginner who wants to start learning Swift, SwiftUI and AppKit for building Mac apps, then this is the book for you.

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Sparkle

Last month, I posted about writing my new todo app called To-Day: why I wrote it and how I wrote it. At the time, I mentioned that I had set it up to install updates using Sparkle but there was too much detail to include in the initial post. So here, as promised, is the article about implementing Sparkle.

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To-Day

When I sit down at my computer at the start of a work day, I typically like to plan out the broad outline of my work. This is the three or four major tasks for my day. I don’t want a minute-by-minute plan, just a list of the major items, so that I can check them off as I work, and get to the end of the day without feeling like I’ve forgotten anything.

There are a ton of todo apps and web services available, but they all provide much more than I need. When I factored in how I wanted to learn about writing a Mac menubar app in SwiftUI, the solution was obvious - write my own.

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New Links

As we round out the year, there are several new addresses I’d like people to use to contact me or get my book.

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SwiftUI for Mac 2022

In December 2019, I wrote a series of articles about using SwiftUI to build a Mac app. And in July 2020, I re-visited the sample app to apply the new SwiftUI features made available in macOS BigSur. Now that macOS Ventura and Xcode 14 are in beta, it’s time to build the app again while learning how to incorporate the new APIs.

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Writing Setup

If you read my blog or tweets, you will have detected that I recently wrote a book called macOS by Tutorials, published by raywenderlich.com. in this post, I’m going to show you what hardware and software I used to write it.

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WWDC 2022 Wishlist

Apple has announced that their 2022 World Wide Developers Conference will again be an online event from June 7 to 11. The poster shows a very dark Swift logo in a coloured circle. While I have long since given up trying the read the tea leaves of Apple’s graphics to work out what they will announce, I always enjoy speculating. But this year, I thought that instead of trying to guess what Apple will have for us, I’d think about what I would like them to announce, with my main focus being the Mac.

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macOS Book

I can finally reveal the reason I have not been blogging. I have been busy writing a book. It’s finally out, so here it is: macOS by Tutorials, published by kodeco.com (formerly raywenderlich.com).

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