I have a control in one of my storyboard that I copy in a lot of screen and even projects. It's just native controls with stack view, scroll views, labels, etc placed with auto-layout already wired together.
Is there a way to add this into the Object Library in Xcode so I can just drag it from there onto my storyboard and still see all the native controls? I want to be able to drag and drop other controls into the stack view and even modify it from there within IB.
I do not want to do this programatically because I want to continue using Interface Builder for my custom control.
s there a way to add this into the Object Library in Xcode so I can just drag it from there onto my storyboard and still see all the native controls?
No. The usual strategy is to keep it in a xib file (so you are using Interface Builder to construct the view complex) and load the nib programatically to get at the view and put it in the interface at runtime. To some extent you can automate that programmatic process by means of a view subclass that loads its own content from the nib.
Or, if this view has different manifestations in different contexts, you might just have to use copy and paste of some template version (presumably you’re already doing that).
Related
I am working on some general dialogs for our content management system. Everything is written programmatically in Cocoa/Objective-C without using xib files.
Unfortunately the focus ring is never displayed, even though I can use TAB to move between the controls, and even though all controls are (or are inherited from) standard controls like NSButton, NSTextField and NSTextView.
On the other side, if I use xib files or storyboard files to make similar dialogs, the focus ring is shown without problems.
I expected that you only would need to draw the focus ring yourself if you are creating a custom view, which is directly inherited from NSView itself, regardless if you are using xib files or not.
Can anyone please help with this? Thank you very much in advance!
I am interested in creating a video editor similar to iMovie on macOS. The scrubber is an interesting component, and I am wondering if anyone knows what control is used to create it.
My personal guess is that it is NSCollectionView.
It is a custom view. It is a subclass of TLKTimelineView called CETimelineView that is embedded in a custom scroll view called LKScrollView.
This makes sense as the video has to be in sync with the timeline, audio and video. Would require a highly optimized control. You can debug the view in xCode.
I'm a total newbie with xcode and swift, trying to wrap my head around ios programming.
I'm designing a storyboard for my app. The storyboard uses containers to keep track of the controls. In one of the containers resides a button. I want to create an outlet for it to add some code when it is clicked.
If the button would be on the base viewport of the storyboard, I would control-drag a blue line from the button to the source window with my UIViewController subclass file, and it would assist me in generating the code. But for some reason when the button is in a container, this just doesn't work.
When following the documentation, it says to open the assistant editor when the button is selected and it should open the relevant file. So it open an objective-c file, but when I try to control-drag into it, it informs me that I do not have write permissions. Also I feel like I should be doing it in a subclass instead.
I have searched online a lot and tried everything I can think about, but nothing has worked so far. How does this work? Can I do it programmatically or so perhaps? I hope someone can straighten out this question mark...
A container view is intended to represent an area that will host a view from a different view controller that becomes a child of the view controller that owns the container. Usually, you would create a second view controller, link your container view to it using an "embed" segue, and then put your buttons and such in the second controller's view. The code behind those would then go into the second controller.
If your purpose is simply to have superviews to control layout within a single view controller, use a UIView rather than a container and the problem goes away. That's what the Editor->Embed In->View menu item is for.
I often make use of views in interface builder that live outside of the viewcontroller hierarchy (see screen grab below for simple example).
Before upgrading to Xcode5 I could get this view to appear on the storyboard by writing an IBAction outlet and dragging a connection from the code to the view in the storyboard.
If you paused over the button for a moment it would flash and then open up as a view on the storyboard that is then a lot easier to work with.
Since upgrading this function no longer seems available. Has anyone found out how to get these views to appear on the storyboard?
Edit:
Using the temporary viewcontroller as described in this answer seems one approach, although fiddly since you need to move the UIView stack between viewcontrollers each time you want to edit the layout. Using a separate XIB is starting to seem like the sanest approach.
https://stackoverflow.com/a/13713385/1060154
Finally, we get this back in Xcode 7.
Hallelu!
I've done a fair amount of iOS development in the past couple of years, so I'm pretty familiar with iOS architecture and app design (everything's a ViewController that you either push, pop, or stick into tab bars). I've recently started exploring proper Mac app development and feel a little lost. I'd like to really just have a sanity check and maybe some advice as to what the proper way to build an app like this is:
I'd like to build a library-style, single window app, that will spawn additional windows during its operation, but not as full-blown documents. The main window will be laid out much like OS X Lion's Mail.app, with a three-wide split view containing:
A source list, or high-level topic selection
A list view of items pertaining to the topic selected in the first pane
A detail view, which shows the details of the object selected in the middle pane
Like I said, really similar to Mail.app as far as looks go.
My question is really how to glue all this together from inside XCode. Here's where my confusion lies so far:
The default project generated a NIB with a main menu and window. I like to encapsulate functionality, so should I make a window controller for this window and somehow hook it up in Interface Builder, or does window-specific functionality belong somewhere else?
If possible, I'd like each of my three panes to be separate view controllers. I created three NSViewController subclasses (XCode automatically generated NIBs), and added (to the main menu/window NIB) view controller objects with each class specified, hooking up each one's view property to one of the three Custom View generic NSView objects I dropped into the NSSplitView. When I tried to set each view controller's NIB, only the main menu/window NIB appeared in the drop-down, and typing the desired one by hand seemed to have no effect (the view's contents didn't actually appear when running the app). This makes me think I'm doing something wrong.
I'm a little fuzzy on what types of views I should use for each of the first two panes. I'll obviously build a custom one for the final pane, but it seems like the first two should be present in the Cocoa framework already.
Anyway, if I'm doing completely the wrong thing, don't bother addressing my questions; just tell me what I should be doing instead. I think I just need a proper Mac developer to point me in the right direction.
With regard to your first question, you don't need to use the main window that Apple supplies in MainMenu.xib. If you want, you are free to delete that window from the nib and then instantiate an NSWindowController in your applicationDidFinishLaunching: delegate method which then loads and controls the main window.
You are definitely confused about NSViewController, which is not really all that surprising, since you might assume that it works like UIViewController.
In fact, NSViewController is completely different to UIViewController and does not have the same level of Interface Builder support. You can't place a view controller in a window in IB, for example, whereas this is standard practice on iOS. NSViewController is a relatively new class on the Mac and generally you use it to load views programmatically and manage the view content.
The class that most closely maps to UIViewController on the Mac is NSWindowController. This has been around a lot longer than NSViewController and in fact many Mac apps don't use NSViewController at all.
Generally, each window in your app should have a window controller managing it. You can use subclasses of NSWindowController to handle a lot of the functionality for each window.
If you want to use NSViewController, then you should use your window controller to manage those view controller objects. This is generally done programmatically due to the aforesaid lack of Interface Builder support. Each NSViewController instance loads its view from a specific nib file. You generally don't add view controllers in Interface Builder.
For your source list you would generally use an NSOutlineView if you have multiple sections or an NSTableView. These two objects are used whenever you need a list of items. NSOutlineView is hierarchical, whereas NSTableView is flat.
I hope this helps.