What’s a UITextEffectsWindow? And why is it receiving messages? 17 September 2009
Posted by Oliver Mason in Apple, iphone, objective-c, programming.1 comment so far
I just spent several hours (or at least it felt like several hours!) in frustration, searching a trivial bug. I’ve been testing a quick’n’easy prototype screen with an UIImageView and four UIButtons. The buttons are linked via an action to a view controller. And every time I press a button, my app conks out complaining that -[UITextEffectsWindow buttonPressed:] was an unrecognised selector. I checked the memory address, and it said it was my view controller, just before that exception was thrown.
I was ready to put the blame on some mistakes with Interface Builder, until I came across the solution (indirectly) in a blog: here the problem described related to properties, and the difference between vc = … and self.vc = …. I had another look at my code and quickly found the offending line: I had the view controller as a local variable in the app delegate’s ‘viewDidLoad’ method, and I autoreleased it. In other words, by the time the button was pressed the view controller no longer existed, and hence I got that weird error message.
This was not helped by the fact that ‘UITextEffectsWindow’ is not mentioned in the documentation anywhere, as it seems to be an internal UIKit class, but at least it appears to be consistent.
So, if your button presses send messages to ‘UITextEffectsWindow’, make sure to check that your view controller is still alive!
Application Promiscuity 7 September 2009
Posted by Oliver Mason in Apple, iphone, objective-c.1 comment so far
I was getting a bit bored with the slow progress on my Esperanto dictionary app, and over the holidays I started work on a few other ideas I had. One was a Maths-drill program for kids, as the ones that are already out there (at least the ones I tried) don’t seem to be ideal (nothing ever is ideal, though!). So I tried writing another app so our kids could play and practice their maths skills.
That app is almost done, just the artwork and sound effects are missing. At the moment it looks pretty rubbish (but looks aren’t that important as long as it works and doesn’t crash!), and the sound effects are nicked from somewhere, so I have to replace them with free ones. Again, the purpose was to try things out.
That app was quite fun, and also easy to do. More on that later…
The next app is one that supports teaching and learning students’ names. This makes use of a navigation controller, which is slow going. I’m picking up loads of experience in Objective-C quirks along the way. For example: avoid using NSNumbers as the keys in a dictionary if you want to save it using writeToFile later on…
Overall it’s very exciting, and the iPhone is a fun platform. It’s really great to see your own stuff amongst all those polished apps, and provides great motivation to do better.
Language and Computation 