CLAlert: NSAlert done right

From NSAlert documentation:

Currently, there is no visual difference between informational and warning alerts.

This was written at the time of Panther and this is still true in Snow Leopard. So why the hell is the setAlertStyle: method provided?

NSCriticalAlertStyle

This style causes the icon to be badged with a caution icon.

A caution icon, for a critical alert? That does not make sense!

Here are screenshots of the default behaviours with the three different alert styles:







The documentation is unfortunately right: there is no difference between the informational and the warning style. The critical style is indeed badged with a caution icon.

As you probably have guessed from the title of this post, I am not happy with this behavior, so I have written a class, CLAlert (MIT License) that displays alerts the way I think it should be done. I.e. a note icon for an informational alert, a caution icon for a warning alert and a stop icon for a critical alert as you can see on these screenshots.







CLAlert is a drop-in replacement for NSAlert. It requires at lest Mac OS X 10.5.

Watch a large number of icons with Preview.app

Browsing .icns files in Preview.app can be painful. If you try to open all the icons of the CoreTypes bundle for example with the following command

open /System/Library/CoreServices/CoreTypes.bundle/Contents/Resources/*icns

you will get this view:


All the different sizes of the .icns are displayed, which makes it quite unpleasant to browse.

F-Script Anywhere to the rescue!

Install F-Script Anywhere into Preview, then do

1. FSA → New F-Script Workspace


2. Click the Browser For Target… button


3. Click on one of the icons


4. Choose the PVIKImageBrowserView object


5. In the F-Script Object Browser, name the PVIKImageBrowserView browserView

Finally, in the F-Script interpreter, paste the following code:

groups := browserView layoutManager groups.
count := groups count.
0 to:count-1 do: [:i | browserView collapseGroup:(groups objectAtIndex:i)]

Tada, a nice browsable view of your icons!