This morning I decided to get TestFlight setup so I could start dropping alpha and beta versions of the app. It didn’t take long, which was really nice, and I’ve submitted a build for Apple to approve for testing. I’d imagine it will take some time to get through the gauntlet since it’s the first version of Stream for Mac. Fingers crossed it doesn’t take long to get through. 🤞🏼
Besides that I added a couple new menu items to the View menu and implemented them.
The first was View > Timeline which is meant to present Stream in its two pane layout with a stream of blog posts in the left column and the text of the post in the right pane. I’ve called it Timeline but I don’t like it. It feels backwards. When Timeline is selected the leftmost list of blogs is hidden so you get that two pane view instead of three. It feels backwards because when it’s checked the blog list is hidden. I need to find a better way of presenting it. The functionality works just fine.
The other menu item is called Read/Unread Dots. I need a better name for this as well. What it does is hide or show the read/unread state dots. When I originally shipped stream I didn’t keep track of read state. It was meant to make viewing a more chill experience. I had a lot of folks reach out and ask me to add that read/unread state, so I did. Now I want a way to turn them off. This feature will make its way back to the iOS App as well, probably in a new menu item or as part of Settings. I need to think on it a bit.
I’d intended to do a bit more but as I was running through the UI testing random stuff I noticed the context menu for the blog list wasn’t working. It worked just fine last weekend but not today. 🤬
I spent the remainder of my work time trying to understand what I’d done wrong. The actions were all hooked up, they just didn’t fire when a menu item was selected. I checked the NSMenuItem and it wasn’t nil and had all the menu items present. It just won’t invoke the associated action.
Depending on how those table view cells are configured I will remove the menu by setting the new menu to nil, but that’s only for the All and Read Later items since the menu items don’t make sense for two things.
The other thing I did was delete my toolbar from the main NIB. I put it back later in the day but it did make me wonder if that change had something to do with my other menus not working. Yeah, it’s a stretch since they’re in separate NIB files. But I sure can’t explain how I broke it. 🤔
Any tips from Mac AppKit experts would be appreciated. 🙏🏼
That’s all for today. It was a good start but that busted menu was a huge time sink and I don’t have an answer for it yet. Maybe I should see if Claude can fix it? 😁