Myriad

Undo is always nice for users, but can be hard for developers. Luckily, this is made easier in Cocoa by NSUndoManager and its prepareWithInvocationTarget method (NSInvocation is great). With this technique, you can just store one method call for the undo reversal. But it’s common to have actions that affect files-and these aren’t as easy to undo. I ran into this in Lexicon for managing LanguageSyncs, which are like dictionary files that are available in many different languages.

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By now I’m sure all Mac OS X developers have heard of Sparkle - the excellent auto-updating framework by Andy Matuschak. When I added Sparkle to Lexicon, I only ran into one problem. The release notes that Sparkle displays are decided by what version you are updating to, but they should depend only on what version you are updating from.

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