I’ve been bothered for a long time by a limitation of NSTextFieldCell that prevents developers from specifying a vertically centered alignment. This is particular annoying in contexts where Apple practically rolls out the red carpet for a particular UI feature, but where taking advantage of that feature is almost guaranteed to produce an ugly result. […]

It’s been a little while since I critiqued (or mercilessly attacked, depending on your perspective) an application’s UI. Actually, it hasn’t been that long at all, but I just downloaded and tried the Mac OS X version of Meetro, and we might as well learn from some of their successes and mistakes. Let me just […]

Handling drags to your Cocoa application is pretty simple: you just have to implement the informal NSDraggingDestination protocol in some view hierarchy object that has been registered for particular drag types. Usually a drag is handled by a specific view that can make sense of the drag’s data type. For instance, an NSTextView will accept […]

I had an off-line chat with Andrew Stone, to see what his reaction was to my recent entry about the design of Videator. He agreed to let me publish his response here as a counterpoint to my pretty strong criticism. He makes some good points and at the end of the day, he’s right: it’s […]