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Category: Tips

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Accessing the User Interface from a Thread

Perhaps you already knew, but with desktop apps it has always been considered bad form to directly access any part of your user interface from within a Thread. Alas, even though this was frowned upon, it generally worked in most of your desktop apps.

Starting with 2013r1, this no longer works with Xojo for Cocoa apps. If a Cocoa app tries to access the UI from a thread, a ThreadAccessingUIException is raised. But what exactly does “accessing the UI” mean? In the case of Cocoa, it means any access to a built-in property or method on any UI control or Window. You can access your own methods or properties added to control subclasses as long as they do not access the UI themselves.

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Merging iCloud and Apple ID Accounts

iCloud.jpegIf you have been around the Mac community long enough, you may have ended up with two Apple IDs. I have one for iTunes and another one that came from MobileMe. This resulted in effectively having two iCloud accounts. This can be inconvenient and probably will become more so in the future. Apple doesn’t provide a means to merge Apple IDs. They know they need to provide this, but they do not yet do so. I, however, have found a way.

Since the introduction of iCloud, I have wanted to have a single Apple ID. When Apple recently added the two-step authentication for Apple IDs to make them more secure, I decided to sign in and update my Apple ID account. Part of the process is to verify a device you own which will be used, along with your password, to authenticate that you are who you say you are should you want to make changes (such as your password) to your Apple ID in the future. The webpage said it would list my devices, but none were listed. It didn’t take long to figure out why. The Apple ID I was updating was for iTunes, while the Apple ID Apple was using to find my devices was the one associated with my iCloud (MobileMe/mac.com) account.

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