Myriad

Opacity is great for creating graphics for use in applications, but how do you ship those images with the application? Including the .opacity file itself would be bad (that would be like shipping your source code with the application), a native image format like TIFF would be better. At the same time, though, it’d be nice to be able to directly edit a .opacity source file and not have to manually rebuild the associated .tiff file each time. Luckily there’s an easy way to make this happen automatically with Opacity.

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Mac OS X has a wealth of graphics frameworks. From the PDF-based Quartz to AppKit to the filter-based Core Image, there’s something for everybody. Unfortunately, these frameworks each do things a little differently, which can lead to trouble when getting them to work with each other. There are system-provided ways to convert between some of these different types, but not for others. I put together a few categories with methods to make it easier for these frameworks to all get along.

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While working on Lexicon and Opacity, I’ve used NSTableViews a lot. They work very well, but there are a few convenient behaviors that they don’t have out of the box.

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Two of my favorite features in Opacity-Calculation Variables and Math Anywhere-are powered by the same technology (that you can probably guess from the title). What’s interesting is that they were originally powered by a different one.

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There’ve been quite a few mentions of NSInvocation recently. I have to agree about how useful it can be, and wanted to mention a few specific places I used it in Lexicon.

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