Feedback form for macOS products
FMPFeedbackForm is an Objective-C framework that lets you add a simple yet effective feedback form to your macOS project.
If you work with Zendesk you’ll get the form up and running with only 10-ish lines of code. You may as well adapt the form to
send feedback to any other service by providing your own implementation of a certain data sender object without much hassle.
The form’s UI includes a checkbox which allows the user to attach a text file to his support request
which contains anonymous information about the user’s machine. This report includes a list of software and hardware specs,
recent console logs and preferences (NSUserDefaults) of your application.
If the default look of the form doesn’t quite suit your needs, you may easily customize any text,
field value or placeholder using a handy interface.
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FMPFeedbackForm requires macOS 10.12 or later.
FMPFeedbackForm is available through CocoaPods. To install it, simply add the following line to your Podfile:
pod 'FMPFeedbackForm'
FMPFeedbackForm is available through Carthage. To install it, simply add the following line to your Cartfile:
github "MacPaw/FMPFeedbackForm"
If you want to use FMPFeedbackForm as dependency to another package, add following to your Package.swift:
dependencies: [
...
.package(url: "https://github.com/MacPaw/FMPFeedbackForm", .upToNextMajor(from: "1.0.0"))
],
...
targets: [
.target(
name: ...
dependencies: [
...,
"FMPFeedbackForm"
]
)
]
Clone this repository (or add it as a submodule) and drag the FMPFeedbackForm.xcodedeproj
into your project in Xcode.
Then go to your target’s General settings tab and add the FMPFeedbackForm.framework
to the “Frameworks, Libraries, and Embedded Content” list.
See FMPDemoApp
project for an example of this method.
FMPFeedbackController
is an NSWindowController
subclass which handles your form’s window presentation.
It also provides a practical public interface with all the necessary tools for you to customize and handle the form’s work.
In order to initialize the controller you’ll need an object that conforms to FMPFeedbackSender
protocol.
It has a self-described name — this object should be able to send the data gathered by the form and report on its success/failure.
If you are working with Zendesk then you may use an already implemented FMPZendeskFeedbackSender
class, use your project’s
credentials to instantiate an object of this type and then pass it to the controller’s initializer.
// Hold a reference to the controller object somewhere, otherwise it'll get deallocated
var feedbackController: FMPFeedbackController?
// User wants to display the feedback form
@IBAction func provideFeedbackButtonClick(_ sender: Any) {
// Instantiate an FMPFeedbackSender object
let zendeskSender = FMPZendeskFeedbackSender(zendeskSubdomain: "subdomain", // (1)
authToken: "sometoken", // (2)
productName: "My App") // (3)
// Create the controller
feedbackController = FMPFeedbackController(feedbackSender: zendeskSender)
// Present the form
feedbackController?.showWindow(self)
}
That’s it, you’ve just displayed a basic form that’ll send feedback to your project on Zendesk!
For clarity, let’s break down the credentials that you pass on FMPZendeskFeedbackSender
init:
subdomain
in https://subdomain.zendesk.com
.[My App] Bug Report
.In case you want to send feedback somewhere else, you’ll have to provide your own implementation of the FMPFeedbackSender
object.
You may look up the FMPZendeskFeedbackSender.m
file to get the basic idea of what’s going on.
The way the form looks is defined by the controller’s settings
property which is represented by an FMPInterfaceSettings
object.
It contains all the strings used in the form’s UI and you may also specify an icon to display in the form’s top left corner.
There are two ways to change the form’s settings.
let settings = FMPInterfaceSettings.default
settings.title = "My App feedback"
settings.subtitle = "We'd love to know what you think of our product."
settings.subjectOptions = ["Feedback", "Bug Report", "Support Request"]
if let iconResource = NSImage(contentsOf: "path/to/icon.png") {
settings.icon = iconResource
settings.iconSize = NSSize(width: 64, height: 64) // default value
}
feedbackController = FMPFeedbackController(feedbackSender: sender, settings: settings)
feedbackController?.settings.title = "My App feedback"
feedbackController?.settings.subtitle = "We'd love to know what you think of our product."
feedbackController?.settings.subjectOptions = ["Feedback", "Bug Report", "Support Request"]
if let iconResource = NSImage(contentsOf: "path/to/icon.png") {
feedbackController?.settings.icon = iconResource
feedbackController?.settings.iconSize = NSSize(width: 64, height: 64) // default value
}
You may also specify the user’s name and email to simplify filling out the form:
feedbackController?.settings.defaultName = "John Doe"
feedbackController?.settings.defaultEmail = "[email protected]"
You may change the way the form behaves after successfull/failed feedback submission.
By default FMPFeedbackController
handles these events gracefully by showing a localized alert and closing the form’s window on success,
or by presenting an error sheet over the form’s window in case of error.
You can turn this off by setting these properties to false
:
feedbackController?.showsGenericSuccessAlert = false
feedbackController?.showsGenericErrorSheet = false
You may also handle these events yourself by setting a onDidSendFeedback
completion (executes after the default behaviour
if it hasn’t been turned off):
feedbackController?.onDidSendFeedback = { [weak self] error in
guard let error = error else {
// Error is nil, display your custom success message
self?.showSuccessMessage()
self?.feedbackController?.close()
return
}
// Error is not nil, submission failed, display error
self?.showErrorMessage(with: error)
}
FMPFeedbackForm
gathers data for system profile report almost without any of your input, yet to achieve better quality
of gathered data you may need to specify two things.
The console logs of your application are collected using the Apple System Log API, which doesn’t always provide all of the
needed data and mostly gathers system errors related to your application. If you use CocoaLumberjack
or some other tool
to write logs to separate text files you may specify them to the feedback controller and their contents will be included
in the report:
feedbackController?.logURLs = [URL(fileURLWithPath: "path/to/file.log"),
URL(fileURLWithPath: "path/to/otherFile.txt")]
You may also want to specify your custom NSUserDefaults
domain (or suite name) in case you use something different from your
app’s bundle ID:
feedbackController?.userDefaultsDomain = "com.MyCompany.MyAppsNonDefaultDomain"
Most of the logic described above is conveniently implemented in the demo app available in this repository.
Please refer to it for a more detailed look on how to use the feedback form.
FMPFeedbackForm is available under the MIT license.
See the LICENSE file for more info.