@jnjosh’s internet weblog.
Even when you’ve been working in an environment for years, you still find things you never knew. I liken it to learning about a famous actor you had never heard of, but has starred in all your favorite movies. I found two things that I wish I had known or seen, but for whatever reason, I missed. First up, convenience functions for converting a CGRect to a NSString or a NSString to a CGRect.
I am working on a small app at the office for all our mac users to help locate files on the network (more on this later), I decided to go with a spotlight style NSStatusItem based app. I’ve been really inspired by these apps lately (when done right). Mostly thanks to Notify. To make this more handy I decided to include a global hotkey. For Leopard and earlier, one problem is you have to use the old Carbon-based events.
This really isn’t a trick, or even a tip. In fact, no additional code was written to get this behavior. However, it is too cool not to show some how and the small pictures on the App Store don’t do it justice. By placing a UIView (or subclassed view) on the bottom of my main view, messages to touchesMoved:withEvent: are made as soon as your finger crosses into the iPhone’s screen.