AVPlayer doesn’t provide a built-in way to fade in or out. I previously described how you achieve a video fade-in (or out) using general CoreAnimation layer animation, as part of making a macOS screen saver. Now let’s tackle the audio. I’m not certain what curve this implements, but to my ears it doesn’t sound quite… Read more
This is pretty rudimentary, but apparently our robot overlords need me to write this post because many of them suggested some truly bizarre approaches, some of which don’t work at all. If you’re using AVQueuePlayer, then just use AVPlayerLooper. Easy. But if for some reason you want to use AVPlayer specifically (e.g. you need to… Read more
First, make sure you really want to. macOS’s screen saver system is absurdly buggy and broken. It’s frustrating to work with and very difficult to make work right. If you’re determined, read on. Screen savers are basically just applications. Same bundle format and structure, just with a “saver” extension instead of “app”. Setting up the… Read more
Sometimes you just need to shove a round peg into a square hole. Sometimes that genuinely is the best option (or perhaps more accurately: the least bad option). I find my hand is often forced by APIs I don’t control (most often Apple’s APIs). e.g. data source or delegate callbacks that are synchronous and require… Read more
NSCopyObject is a very old Foundation function – pre-dating Mac OS X entirely; from the NeXT era – that was originally basically just memcpy, but now it’s complicated. A lot more complicated… Read more
Five years ago installing Swift on a Raspberry Pi – or really any non-Apple platform – was fairly involved. Compared to getting a Raspberry Pi working to begin with it was easy, but still a far cry from apt install swift. Sadly it’s still not quite that easy (and some Python package is squatting on… Read more
Swift makes it relatively easy to format numbers as byte counts, with appropriate suffixes to indicate units and generally sensible auto-selection of scale factors. e.g.: 1 kB (in English – results may vary depending on locale) This is just a small subset of Swift’s FormatStyle-based formatting capabilities, with which I have a bit of a… Read more