Our staff is back to working on Goldenseal Pro. Right now we are focused on the little tables inside lists. It’s going well, with steady progress each day.
Working with Cocoa’s NSTableView class has been extremely frustrating the past few months, but I think we are finally over the hump.
About a year ago, it only took a few weeks to get the various tables to show data. Back then we were very optimistic. Unfortunately, creating a data entry interface turned out to be much, much harder than just displaying some text.
Apple has two different ways to set up tables: with cells or with views. Last year, we set up all the tables with cells. They are simpler, and we couldn’t find any sample code that used views. Unfortunately, since then we discovered that Apple has deprecated cell-based tables. That means they are officially obsolete, and will eventually stop working.
Because of that, we switched the list tables over to view-based. After everything is working properly there, it shouldn’t be too painful to go back and switch over the other tables, also. After all this effort, we really don’t want to start out with any outdated code in Goldenseal Pro.
During the past month, our staff spent many hours in Excel, fiddling with the spreadsheets that calculate pricing and page details for SmartKnives.com. It was interesting to be writing Excel macros again! That is how TurtleSoft first began, back in the late 80s.
It was also interesting to work with the new Cocoa-based rewrite of Excel for Macintosh. It seems very clunky and awkward, compared to the previous Carbon versions. Maybe we aren’t the only ones who have struggled with NSTableView.
Dennis Kolva
Programming Director
TurtleSoft.com
