Here it is: A comprehensive look at `NSItemProvider`: what it does, how it works, and how to use it properly. I want this to be a one-stop-shop reference for anyone using this class in their projects.

NSItemProvider is a key class in iOS and Mac Catalyst, used in everything from Drag and Drop, to Pasteboard, share sheet, and beyond. Understanding how this class works will help you make better apps and gain insight into what the system does for you.

Please read the post, and send me feedback. Share it with your iOS developer friends. Let me know what you think!

https://www.humancode.us/2023/07/08/all-about-nsitemprovider.html

I am overjoyed that not one, but TWO #Mastodon clients are now available on the #Mac, running on #MacCatalyst.

I worked a TON on Mac Catalyst for over five years until I left #Apple last year, in the sincere hope that it would make it easier for authors to write great iOS apps that can also be polished into excellent apps for the Mac. It pleases me to no end that both @ivory and @MonaApp used Catalyst to port their fantastic #Mastodon clients to the Mac, allowing the Mac to become first-class peers of their iOS products.

Congratulations to both apps for achieving this! As an ex-Catalyst plumber, I’m grinning from ear to ear.

Hey #MacCatalyst devs, did you know YOU TOO can use HelpBooks in your apps, and make your app feel more Mac-ass than ever? It’s true.

HelpBooks are basically web pages that are shown in HelpViewer and integrates with the rest of the Mac help system. While creating HTML pages to populate the HelpBook is easy, packaging them and programmatically jumping to anchors in your book is not.

That’s why I wrote this minimal demo app to show you how to do it. There’s even a convenience class that lets you jump to anchors programmatically.

Now go make your Catalyst apps even more Mac-like!

https://github.com/dave-humancode/HelpBookSample

Credit to @marioguzman for documenting the format. Apple’s documentation is really quite poor. You can read his article here: https://marioaguzman.wordpress.com/2020/09/12/auth/

Have you ever noticed that when you build an iOS app for Mac Catalyst, $PLATFORM_NAME is set to `macosx`?

When Catalyst was being hashed out, there was quite a bit of discussion around whether we were building against the *iOS* SDK on the Mac, or against a *Mac* SDK that happened to know about iOS. As you can guess in retrospect, the latter worldview prevailed: the Catalyst SDK is a “variant” of the Mac SDK. This made our builder tools folks quite happy, because the Catalyst SDK could be built alongside the Mac one, and Catalyst apps and daemons bundled with macOS could be built together with the rest of macOS.

Xcode, however, seems to continue to insist in its UI that Catalyst apps are actually *iOS* apps that happen to support the Mac.

Which worldview you choose to believe is up to you! I know which one I prefer.