I'm trying to find a Cocoa control/button that is "text only" and tracks its highlight when click on. I've tried several combinations of push button with the Bordered checkbox unchecked, and Type set to as momentary push in, momentary light, and momentary change -- but I get no animation or difference in the running program (when the button is clicked).
Have you tried something like this?
It gives a button without borders, which highlights text on click, and unhighlights on the next click:
Is it something like you're looking for?
Related
Desired look
I wish to make a toolbar for my app that will contain some simple buttons, each with a single monochromatic icon. Here is an example of some toolbar buttons similar to I'm trying to achieve, from Mail's compose window:
Notice these buttons have a consistent size, inner padding, padding, and shading. This is a pretty consistent style across macOS, present in Mail, Safari, Finder, etc. This leads me to suspect there's a standardized UI component for creating such buttons.
If I use a segmented control, each button looks correct, with each icon being correctly padded:
Now I would like to add individual buttons that match the style.
Attempt 1
My first attempt was to add a "Push Button" (NSButton) to the toolbar:
This resulted in a wide button that's a bit too short, and not lined up with the segmented control:
Attempt 2
My second attempt was to use a segmented control, with only 1 segment.
This resulted in a button that's the right shape, size, etc., but it was off center relative to its label.
Naturally, I can manually adjust the button to match the goal, but I feel like I'm missing something. What's the proper way to create these standard buttons?
This is actually quite easy to do and you were close already.
You can use NSButton for that. Note that it has different styles (defined in NSButton.BezelStyle) to choose from. The default one is the one to use inside windows and modals. But for toolbars, to match the style of segmented controls and search bars, you can choose the style .texturedRounded.
You can also set the style via Interface Builder. Note that you have to select the button itself, not the toolbar item around it.
To get the correct size, you seem to set the icon within the toolbar item, not the button itself.
Here is my result:
So I downloaded CircleView and tried to change the code. The program came with a button, color wheel, 2 sliders, and a view. When ever I add anything (Slider, button, textfield), on run time the things I added wouldn't show up. What am I not doing?
It's a .nib file.
This is the edit page.
This is what I see when running the program.
As you can see, the button and textfield doesn't appear during run time.
By default, when you add a button, the autoresizing mask (aka "springs and struts") are set to the following:
That means that when you resize the window, the button you added will stay in the same spot it originally was, instead of being "pulled" down with the edge of the window. This could potentially cause the buttons or textfields you added to be hidden behind the circle view once you resize the window large enough.
To prevent that from happening you'll want to change the autoresizing mask of the items to be "pinned" to the bottom edge of the window, so that they look like in the following image:
To do that, click on the red I bar at the top of the square to remove it, and then click on the lower I area to turn it on.
Note that you can also select multiple buttons or textfields at one time to change them all at the same time.
I have a bunch of buttons. They appears as an graphical image. If a user clicked on a button I can determine with
sender.titleLabel!.text!
which button the user pressed. But the title of the button appears in the view. I want only to show the image and give the button a invisible title. But I think that is not possible.
Me second solution is to create for each button an outlet. But I think with 30 buttons that is a very bad solution.
Option 1:
For the button text color property set opacity to 0. The text is there, but fully transparent.
Option 2:
You may use the tag value to identify a button so you do not have to rely on the button title. You can set the tag value in interface builder (Xcode) or in code. (The tag is an integer.)
I usually prefer option 2 as it is resilient to text changes over time (think of typos, translations for other languages etc.).
I have an NSButton created in Interface Builder with the style "Round Textured". When the button is disabled, the text colour does not go grey as you would expect. Oddly enough when the button contains an image instead of text, the image does go grey, as seen in the below screenshot (top buttons are enabled, bottom buttons are disabled).
How can I get the text to go grey when the button is disabled?
Update: So it gets weirder: the view containing the button is shown in a popover and every second time the view is shown the button is greyed out.
It seems, at least in Yosemite, as long as you set button.wantsLayer = YES on the button view, that it then works. Go figure.
I'm working on some updates to my first Mac app and I'm trying to get my window's toolbar buttons to look like the toolbar buttons on EVERY standard Mac app. However, for the life of me, I can't find a button type or a barbutton type that gets me what I'm looking for. Am I missing something?
Here is an image showing several Mac apps (Preview, Finder, and Safari) with toolbars at the top which have very-slighty rounded corner buttons which also have a slight gradient on them, etc.
However, in my .xib I've got a toolbar and I've dropped every kind of button I can find on the thing and nothing looks like the standard Mac button.
The first button looks pretty close, but it's clearly not the same color. Am I missing something?
#Matt Ball is right - you can use NSSegmentedControls, even for single one-time click buttons. Just set the number of segments to 1, and set the mode to "Select None".
One of my shipping apps uses this technique, see below:
All of the controls there are NSSegmentedControl, including the single one.
Update: there are a few standard button icons which are meant for toolbars. The NSImage Class Reference has a list.
In the above screenshot, only two of the buttons are using built-in images: NSLeftFacingTriangleTemplate, and NSRightFacingTriangleTemplate. The others I drew myself.