I am quite new to NSTableView but as I tried to get things straight, I took a look at InterfaceBuilder!!
TableView hierarchy
I understand that objects are responsible for scrolling and clipping. TableView is the real NSTableView instance. The object titled function list ist the NSTableColumn below that is my TableCellView objects. What I don't understand is the object TextCell. It doesn't seem anything to do. Even wrong colors and alike have no effect at all. I am using a view based variant. Is the TextCell solely for cell based TableViews?
I found that part not quite well documented. I am planning on building custom views for my table. So I was thinking a thorough understanding would be a good approach.
Yes, it's strange that that's still there. It's useless and has no effect on anything, but you can't delete it. Ignore it.
Related
I'm experimenting with NSCollectionView after doing some practicing with UICollectionView for iOS. I'm planning to write an app which central part is a flexible grid view on that cards can be dragged around freely and I want to start with a OSX version first before tackling a iOS version.
The UICollectionView seemed like a good choice for my purpose so far (with a custom UICollectionViewLayout anyway) but now that I'm getting to know NSCollectionView for Cocoa on OSX this class seems rather meagre since there doesn't seem to be a comparable NSCollectionViewLayout class and in-depth info or tutorials on the web seem really sparsely seeded.
So is the NSCollectionView class actually a recommended choice at all for what I need? Or could anyone recommend me a better approach to get started going the right way with this?
(What I need is a performant, scrollable view with rows and columns onto that sub views can be dragged and dropped around freely.)
I agree, not recommended.
NSCollectionView performance is bad.
NSArrayController is an enigma also.
That said, there was a old example of someone rolling their own,
which is good sample code to peruse.
... google "TigerCollectionView".
Your going to run into issues with every user interaction... drag, drop, insert, deferred layout, reload, etc.
Better to roll your own using arrays of dictionaries, so you can see whats going on.
I want to know how can I create custom widgets/controls in Cocoa.
Not a full tutorial, but some guidance on what to start looking into. I'm confused by custom views, Core Animation, etc. I feel lost.
I see a lot of cool looking controls, like in Reeder App, or Sparrow etc. For example:
The left side is a collapsable menu that includes animations etc. How can I achieve something similar? I thought of using a WebView + HTML + JavaScript, but that doesn't seem like a very optimized solution.
Controls are views, so if custom views confuse you, you'll need to get that figured out before moving on to custom controls. Although you should really read the entire View Programming Guide, the section called Creating a Custom View will get you started on creating your own views. Try creating a simple view that draws a circle, for example, or the time.
When you've got views figured out, move on to custom controls. Most controls work about the same way. The user touches them, and the control responds by: a) tracking the user's input, b) changing its value, c) sending its action message to its target, and d) giving the user some feedback by redrawing itself. To get started, first make sure that you know how to use controls. Reading Control and Cell Programming Topics should help, and the section titled Subclassing NSControl covers (obviously) creating your own subclasses.
The example you provided is pretty clearly Apple's Mail.app. The view on the left side of the window might be an instance of NSOutlineView, or it might be a custom class. Either way, NSOutlineView would be a good starting point if you want to duplicate that functionality. NSOutlineView is a subclass of NSTableView, which in turn is a subclass of NSControl, which in turn is a subclass of NSView. Read Outline View Programming Topics for help getting started -- tables and outlines are extremely useful, but also more complicated to use than basic controls like buttons and text fields.
I know it's only a part of the UI, but I've recently coded something similar to the sidebar. If you look though the source-code it may give you some help on learning how to use custom controls and cells.
You can check it out on Github:
https://github.com/iluuu1994/ITSidebar
I am trying to create a view for a kind of brainstorming application like, for example, OmniGraffle, with elements that contain textviews and can be dragged around. (Also, the should be connectable with arrows, but that is not (yet) the problem)
I did my homework and searched via google and read books about cocoa, but there seems to be no similar example around.
Since I am also new to cocoa, I’m a bit helpless here.
The thing I am sure of is, that I need a custom view in which I can create my elements - what I tried until now to do that is:
First, I searched for the syntax to add subwindows to a window to create my elements. Subwindows, I imagined, would automatically be movable and come to front and so on.
The problem: As the experienced Cocoa-programmers of you probably are not surprised, I was stunned to find nothing about anything like that - this seems to be something, that is just not intended in Cocoa?!
Then I thought about creating subviews that contain a custom view for the title bar drawing (where the user can click to drag the element) and a NSTextView.
Problems:
I read, that it is not so clever to create dozens of subviews in a window because that would be very slow (or would that be not so bad in this case because all the subviews would be instances of always the same class?).
Also I can’t find out how to load a subview from a nib- or xib-file. Would I need a viewController? Or would that make the dozens-of-instances-problem even worse?
And Apple tells you not to overlap subviews (okay, that would be not so important, but I really wonder how the guys at OmniGroup made OmniGraffle...)
Because of that, I now wanted to do the title-bar-drawing in the surrounding custom view and create the textview programmatically (as I understand, a text-“view“ ist not really a view and takes its functionality from NSCell to reduce all the effort with the views?).
Problems:
Even that failed because I was not able to create a textview that doesn’t fill the complete window (the initWithFrame: of the [[NSScrollView alloc] initWithFrame: aRect] just seems to be ignored or do I get that wrong?).
Also, there should be some buttons on each element in the final application. I imagine that would be easier to accomplish with a subview from a nib-file for each element?
Well, now that nothing works and the more I read, the more problems seem to occur, I am pretty confused and frustrated.
How could I realize such a program? Could someone please push me in the right direction?
I created a class for the draggable elements where I save position, size and text in instance variables. In my view, every new element instance is added to an array (for now, this works without a controller). The array is used to draw all the elements in a loop in drawRect:. For the text of the element I just use a NSTextFieldCell which is set to the saved text from every element in the same loop.
That way it is also possible to overlap the elements.
I’m starting to develop my first full-blown Cocoa application containing a view which I would like to behave (and look) similar to Automator’s AMWorkflowView.
The basic features I’d like to achieve:
Positioning of subviews
Display of subviews in expanded / collapsed states
Multiple selection
Drag and drop
In order to get accustomed to Cocoa, I started with a custom NSView which mainly served as a container for the custom subviews and handled their positioning and multiple selection.
The subviews are also subclasses of NSView, and contain a variable amount of views themselves, like buttons, labels and popup menus, and therefore can have different heights.
This worked quite well, but before going on, I want to make sure to have everything neat and tidy according to the MVC pattern.
I suspect that there already is a class in Cocoa that facilitates the implementation of a view container, like maybe NSCollectionView.
It seems that there is no (easy) way to display differently sized views in an NSCollectionView, though. Should I continue implementing my custom NSView (probably using an NSArrayController for selection and sorting support), or are there better ways to go?
Any help is much appreciated
Unfortunately the answer is you'll have to roll your own. NSCollectionView does not allow for variable-sized items (which also rules out expanded/collapsed states).
For a limited number of items, you can accomplish this rather easily (you just need a container view that arranges the subviews properly when asked to layout, then you need to make sure you re-layout when things change). For many subviews, however, you'll need to take care to be as efficient as possible. This can start with laying out as little as possible (only those "after" the resized view, for example) and get as complex as caching a visual representation of a prototype view, drawing the cached images (fast!) for all but the view being edited, and only using/positioning a "real" view for the view being edited.
Drag and drop works the same as it always has, but none of the above accounts for the pretty animation NSCollectionView gives you. :-) It's fast and beautifully-animated precisely because all the subviews are uniform (so the layout calculations are fast and simple). Once you add irregular sizes, the problem becomes significantly more complicated.
The bottom line: If you need variably-sized views, NSCollectionView will not work and you'll need to roll your own or find someone else's shared code, but performance and beautiful animation will not be easy.
I want to build a Cocoa App with a list of entries very similar to the ToDo list of Things.app (see the screencast). The question is whether I should use
a TableView,
a CollectionView or
a WebView.
I think it could work with all of them, but which one suits the following requirements best?
have a list of entries -> 1 column & many rows
reordering with drag & drop
select single entries & use keys for actions like delete
open up an entry: the row should expand to show more input fields
customized look: rounded corners, shadow, background gradient
So far my research says that the TableView has most of the functionality, but is harder to customize in its appearance, the CollectionView doesn't have drag & drop (right?) but is easy to design and the WebView would take much effort to not hurt the user experience and I can't bind my model directly to input fields.
What pros and cons am I missing and what would you recommend to use?
A WebView doesn't make sense. You might as well create a web application if you use a WebView. An NSCollectionView is more for grid like data, like TV listings per hour.
NSTableView is the only one that makes sense in this case. I've implemented all 5 bullet points with with an NSTableView without issue. You need to extend NSTableView and do some custom drawing for the customized look. That's the hardest part.
open up an entry: the row should expand to show more input fields
You need an outline view. A table view is for flat lists.
Note that NSOutlineView is a subclass of NSTableView, so all the table-view features work on an outline view as well.
There are people who've done this already. One that I've used successfully is by Matteo Bertozzi and is available here: http://th30z.netsons.org/2009/03/cocoa-sidebar-with-badges-take-2/ It might take a bit of massaging to get it to work properly (especially if you need complex drag-and-drop behavior), but for basic functionality, such as getting the section titles and items in the list, it works excellently.
Edit: This has come up before and is a common question on the cocoa-dev email list. Here are some other options.
Just took a look at Things.app itself using "F-script anywhere".
They've used a subclass of NSTableView called "DetailTableView" which presents the condensed todo items. Collapsed todo items are implemented using a custom cell called "ToDoCell", but the expanded look you get when editing is interesting. In that case they've got a custom view called "ToDoEditView" which is inserted as a subview of the DetailTableView when required. I suspect this editing view is temporarily added as a subview in the correct location and the corresponding row of the tableview gets resized temporarily while it is present.
All pretty speculative .. I'd love to know the details of how this was done. It's an awesome UI.
I'm approaching the very same problem in my app (with one big list similar to the Things todo list) and I think a table view would make a lot of sense here.
The trick is having your cells ("rows") expand when double-clicked. That's about all the progress I've made so far.