GSoC 2024: Improvements to the Blender macOS User Interface Experience - Weekly Reports

Contributing to Blender Summer of Code
18

Week 9

July 22 - 26

Overall a much more productive week, here’s what has been accomplished in this period:

This Week:

  • Objective-C Refactor
    • Finished the main Cocoa Refactor, overhauling style, memory management, AppKit subclasses, and more, making for a more solid and maintainable base for further macOS improvements. Final diff of +1594, -1671 changes
    • Ported the BLI_delete_soft function from Obj-C Runtime code to proper Objective-C
    • Objective-C allocations and release pool profiling, leaks corrected in the refactor
  • New and Improved Color Picker Layout (PR Link)
    Capture_2024-07-30_04.14.07
    Capture_2024-07-30_04.14.07462×736 169 KB
  • Experimented with new macOS specific deliverables taking advantages of the Cocoa Refactor (see Next Goals)

Next Goals:

  • macOS Image Copy/Pasting Support
  • macOS Titlebar filename and save indicator text improvements
  • Add iCloud in the File Explorer sidebar and port the underlying macOS filesystem code to modern Objective-C
  • More Objective-C Refactors (Carbon Deprecation, Metal code, etc…)

As a small bonus, macOS builds for the Colored macOS Titlebar PR are available here. Feel free to test it and share your feedback in this thread if you’re interested.

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