Core Data undo background thread deletion - objective-c

I'm developing sort of a drawing app in which the user sets points on a canvas. What's being drawn gets stored as NSManagedObjects. I also enabled the undo manager so the user can undo the last drawing gestures by pressing a button.
It all works as expected.
Then I have a button to delete everything on the canvas (clear canvas). When pressed I make the deletion operation on a background thread cause it might take a while and I want to present a progress bar. Then I merge the background thread's model object context with the main thread's one. This works fine too.
But I would like to be able for the user to undo the complete deletion operation with just one tap on the undo button. This is what I'm unable to do.
For the multithreading part I'm following this tutorial: http://www.cimgf.com/2011/05/04/core-data-and-threads-without-the-headache/
It seems I can't get this to undo beyond the merge of the two threads (it worked once, though, I don't know why). Don't know if I'm supposed to nest the whole thing in undo groups. I have tried but still no luck.

I believe you can do it with nested undo groups.
Wrap your operation and merge between
-(void)beginUndoGrouping;
-(void)endUndoGrouping;
... and use -(void)undoNestedGroup to undo.

Related

NSScrollView: Magnify with CMD+scroll interaction with preserved responsive scrolling

In Mavericks, Apple introduced responsive scrolling architecture in NSScrollView. This feature adds a smart way for generating overdraws and decouples handling of the incoming scroll events from the main event loop into a separate one. This topic is described in detail in the session 215 from WWDC 2013.
Because of the different event model, the scroll events no longer go through the scrollWheel(with:) method. In fact, if you override this method in the NSScrollView subclass, you opt-out from the responsive scrolling architecture completely and fall back to the legacy model.
In my NSScrollView I'd like to implement an interaction for magnification using scrolling while holding the command key. This can be observed in MindNode or OmniGraffle apps. The standard way to do this would be overriding scrollWheel(with:) and checking the modifierFlags on each scroll event. As described above, this would cause an opt-out from the responsive scrolling model.
I wonder whether there is a way to implement this interaction while also preserving the responsive scrolling?
What I have already achieved/tried:
In my NSScrollView subclass I have overridden scrollWheel(with:) and am returning true from the static property isCompatibleWithResponsiveScrolling in order to force the participation in responsive scrolling.
This way I am able to check the first scroll event for the modifier flags. If the command key is NOT pressed, I simply pass the event to super and let the NSScrollView do its thing. If the command key is pressed, I go a different route and track next scroll events on the window to do the magnification.
The problem is when one of these tracking loops is running and the user changes the press state of the command key (either presses it or releases it).
The switch from magnification to scrolling (on command key release) is simple, since the tracking loop is fully under my control.
The switch from scrolling to magnification (on command key press) is more tricky, because I cannot check the scroll events. I have overridden flagsChanged(with:) and can observe when this moment happens but I have not found a way to end the scrolling. This SO question asks about ending/disabling scrolling but has no answer yet.
I’m going to answer here instead of in comments, since I have more data.
There are two issues with “Responsive scrolling”:
(1) A few years ago there was a bug — a difference in how accelerated responsive scrolling was vs. legacy scrolling. By accelerated I mean the distance the document would travel for any given amount of movement of the fingers on the trackpad — legacy scrolling didn’t move the document as much so it felt sluggish. I reported this and it seems to have been fixed in 10.14, at least.
⑵ As near as I can tell from my research and talking to Apple people “Responsive scrolling” was designed to make scrolling more consistent even when an application is hogging the main thread (which would normally block the flow of events) — it processes scroll wheel events on a background thread instead and then messages the main thread with them. Since this still involves the main thread being called per scrolling event (or scrolling events being coalesced) I’m not clear what situations this is a win in. There may be some extra magic where the scrollview will draw more of the document from the cached content of you implement the optional caching stuff.
In my app I’m actually using the scrollview with a dummy (transparent) document and I take its scroll events and move around a SceneKit camera. Since my scene changes dramatically as you scroll around there’s no benefit to trying to pre-render outside the visible rect.
So in my case I no longer perceive any performance difference between responsive and legacy scrolling (although I did back when I filed the bug).

Overlay in wxWidgets

I need a control
It should be asynchronous (should not block the launching thread).
It should block all the user interactions with background screen.
Backdrop shadow on background so that it gives the feeling of disabled interactions with background.
I tried wxBusyInfo. It solves my first requirement, but one can interact with background window.
Then I use the wxWindowDisabler with wxBusyInfo, It disables the background window. But looks like events are getting buffered while disabler is on and when I am destroying wxWindowDisabler object, buffered events are firing.
Then I found wxEventBlocker that can be used to block the events.
Is this the right way to achieve the requirements?
wxBusyInfo is the right class to do what you want, it doesn't dispatch events, so I'm not sure how do you manage to interact with anything while it is shown. Because it doesn't dispatch events -- even the repaint ones -- it's not recommended to show it for relatively long periods of time. If you need something more permanent, use wxProgressDialog.
Finally, wxEventBlocker is a rather special class which is only useful in very specific circumstances and this is not one of them.

Movable objects around a wxPanel

In wxWidgets, I would like to have 2 objects on a wxPanel joined by a line and with a mouse down event to relocate the position of either of the 2 objects (The line should automatically be redrawn to follow the new position of the objects). I have tried using wxPaintDC to draw the initial position of the 2 objects (Custom created with mouse click events) and using dc.DrawLine to join these 2 objects together with a line. How should I proceed to allow make those 2 objects movable (mouse down event) along with the line? Can this even be achieve?
Of course it's possible (just about everything is, it's "only" a matter of effort), but it's not completely trivial and you may want to use OGL which does it for you. On the flip side, OGL is very old and completely unmaintained since a long time, so if your needs are really simple, it's probably still better to do it yourself.
If you do, here are some hints:
For mouse handling, you first need an (efficient if possible) hit testing function.
Once you have it, it's easy to detect where a click happens and what object is under it and start moving it if it makes sense. To be more user friendly, the move shouldn't start immediately, but wait until either the mouse moves a little, or stays pressed for some longer time (this will avoid accidental moves).
When the user is dragging the mouse you will get wxEVT_MOTION events. Use wxMouseEvent::Dragging() in your handler to check whether any mouse button is pressed.
Whatever you do, you must always draw from your wxEVT_PAINT handler, i.e. if an object moves, you must not redraw it immediately, but update its position, invalidate the area taken by it before and after the move (invalidating everything is simpler, but less efficient) and draw it from your OnPaint().
You want double buffering to avoid flicker, see wxAutoBufferedPaintDC

Lazy loading images in a UITableView that has a scroll index

I think this is a new spin on an old question, but I'm completely stuck here.
In my app, I have a UITableView with 650 cells, each with a custom 16x16 RGB icon. On most recent iOS devices, loading all of those icons into memory before displaying the table works totally fine, but on older hardware, I'd like to implement a lazy load system that only loads icons it needs.
I've implemented the Apple LazyTableImages example, (which uses a UIScrollView delegate to determine when the table stops moving to load the visible icons), but I've run into another snag.
My UITableView also has a section index display (ie the list of labels on the right hand side you can swipe up and down to scroll quickly), and the LazyTableImages example hasn't taken this into account.
If I scroll using the index, the images won't lazy-load. :(
As far as I can see, the scroll index doesn't actually have any delegate events it triggers.
So I'm wondering, has anyone else tried to implement lazy-loading on a table with a scroll index? Is there any way to track the index and find out if the user has interacted with it?
Thanks!
After buzzing around a few of my iOS developer buddies, I came up with a solution that worked well enough.
I set it up so that in addition to the icons being loaded from the UIScrollView delegates, an NSTimer object will periodically call a method that checks the currently visible table cells ([UITableView indexPathsForVisibleRows]) every .5 seconds, and loads any icons on the screen that haven't been loaded yet in a single separate thread.
I tried to make the solution as efficient as possible, so I made sure the timer was only active when the tableView was visible and stationary, and I liked it since it meant that every visible icon regardless was addressed.
One thing I discovered was that if the tableView was reloaded while the thread was looping through the visible cells (rare, but was possible), it would crash. The solution to this was to make sure each cell data source entry was retained while the icon was being loaded.

(Mac) Panel Re-size issue

I've created an application for Mac that uses a horizontal resize view (technically a BWToolkit resize view) that is linked to a toggleCollapse button. After collapsing and expanding the panel a few times, this happens (see image) right table-view should be flush with panel divider. Any one have any info on why this is happening. I've carefully adjusted my alignment and anchors to be correct but it seems like this is a weird issue that bugs out the view?
EDIT: Is anyone NOT having this issue? Any input would be helpful! Maybe I just need to start fresh?
This is a known bug in BWSplitView itself, and is related to how view animation and timers interact in that view. The details are covered here:
http://bwalkin.lighthouseapp.com/projects/36323/tickets/34-split-view-doesnt-resize-subview-properly-during-a-toggle-uncollapse-after-manual-collapse
Basically, before the view is animated, autoresizesSubviews is unset, so that the view can be collapsed/expanded without affecting the contents; a timer is then scheduled to restore the autoresizesSubviews property for when the animation has completed. But (of course) the animation may sometimes finish ever so slightly earlier, or later, than the scheduled timer fires; so autoresizing is switched on before the animation has completed, resulting in a few pixels resize. As you've probably seen, the subviews tend to move around a bit as the view is collapsed and uncollapsed.
The "full" fix for this would be to restore autoresizing when the CAAnimation has completed using a callback, but this hasn't been implemented yet. However, in that thread "Robert Payne" has posted a version of BWSplitView.m which uses a slightly different approach - the view sizes are recorded before collapsing, and restored after expanding. I applied this patch myself (I think it won't compile at first - but it's a simple matter of an undeclared variable?) and can confirm it does fix the problem.
Let me know if you'd like a BWSplitView.m which compiles successfully, or a copy of the compiled framework.