If you’re using an R800 on the mac for a custom application along with my CSTEventManager library, the following keycodes can be used. Don’t forget that you should configure the R800 as an ISO keyboard.

After reading this stackoverflow post, I thought that I would simplify it by subclassing AFHTTPRequestOperationManager and wrap all of this stuff in a new method that I called GET:parameters:success:failure:unmodified:

According to this other stackoverflow post, NSURLCache needs a little bit of time to warm up, so I added a class initializer. From your AppDelegate’s application:didFinishLaunchingWithOptions: method you can call this early:

Using this new method is simple:

Hopefully this will be useful for you. If you’re worried about a nil unmodified or success block, you can prefix those calls with if (unmodified) unmodified(operation,responseObject) and if (success) success(operation,responseObject).

I don’t like checking if the caller passed me a nil NSError** in my own methods, especially if the implementation is somewhat lengthy, so I’ve put together a very basic C macro that declares an autoreleasing NSError* to use as temporary storage in case of a null NSError** parameter from the caller:

Imagine that I have a method named foo that takes a single NSString* and an optional NSError**:

Now I don’t need to check if I’ve been passed a valid NSError** pointer, because it will be assigned to the local tempError variable if it was nil.

I just thought I’d share something I ran across today with iOS 6 and UISwitch controls.

If you put a UISwitch in a XIB and expect the text inside of the UISwitch to appear in the right language, iOS 6 will look in your app’s (current region name).lproj for a file named (same as xib).strings.

For example, if I have a UI defined in SettingsViewController.xib, and that UI has a UISwitch, and I want a Japanese user to see that switch’s on/off in Japanese, I need to make a file named ja.lproj/SettingsViewController.strings. The strings file doesn’t need to have anything in it, but it can’t be zero length. The easiest thing to do is just throw in something like:

And then convert that file to a binary plist using the plutil command-line tool:

Note: don’t forget the ‘1’ in binary1. More information on man plutil.

If you’re developing exclusively within XCode 5, then I’d suggest just localizing any XIBs and let XCode do the magic for you.

I’ve added a project to GitHub on handling keyboard events in Cocoa apps with blocks.

The handling code is all in the CSTEventManager class: you can register for events like this:

Here’s the contents of my README file from the GitHub project:

NSEvent uses NSTimeInterval (the time since your computer last booted) as the time when an event occurs. For logging and other purposes, I’d rather have an absolute time, and coming from Java, I’m used to Unix time (milliseconds since January 1st, 1970).

I found some great code on Stackoverflow for efficiently converting an NSTimeInterval to a Unix time. Using an Objective-C NSEvent category, I added a new property to NSEvent called “unixtimestamp” that gives you the value in a long long:

The relevant code is in NSEvent+CSTUnixTimestamp.h/m

At the same time, I wanted something similar to the Java AWT’s addEventListener API for handling keyboard events using blocks.

I’m not an AppKit expert, but from what I gathered the simplest technique is subclassing NSWindow and track the keyboard events there. Instead of plopping all of the handling code in that subclass, I made a separate protocol and class so you can quickly reuse the code in other NSResponder implementations.

The protocol is CSTEventSource.h, and the handling class is CSTEventManager.

Another thing that I found annoying is that NSEvent keycode constants don’t exist for most of the standard keys, so I created one for just a couple of keys as an example of how it could be done. Check out CSTKeyConstants.h/m to see how I did it (nothing special).

This project has a complete UI example. When using these classes in your own project that builds everything from a nib, remember to input the NSWindow subclass in the object inspector’s Custom Class field. One trick that I do is override –initWithContentRect:styleMask:backing:defer: and add an NSLog message: if the logging message doesn’t appear when the nib is loaded, that means I forgot to set the custom class.

Run the program and press the spacebar. You should see the down and up events in the attached NSTextField, and the up event is also logged using NSLog, showing how you can register more than one handler per event type.

Repeat keydown events are blocked by default in the CSTEventManager, but you can enable them using the property keyDownRepeat: