Reading through my overflowing RSS feed in NetNewsWire, I came across a relatively old article by Andy Finnell on his blog Safe From Losing Fight. The article, entitled How to implement a magic wand tool, goes into thorough discussion about the algorithm behind the magic wand tool. Andy then goes on to walk you through (with great explanation) all the Cocoa code that gets this to work. I found the article very interesting in two regards. Firstly, I’ve always been amazed at the Magic Wand tool. It seems so impressive and so complex. Now I finally see how to implement it, and it’s surprisingly simple in the scheme of things. Secondly, I found Andy’s approach at the tutorial to be a great model for future tutorials I plan on writing. His work seemed well thought out and well presented. If you ever have wondered how the Photoshop developers made the Magic Wand do its thing or just have a fascination with Cocoa, be sure to check out Andy’s tutorial.