I'm an intermediate iOS developer who's trying to jump on the OSX side of things.
I've been struggling to create an accordion-like display of several views, where only one view at a time can be unfolded to occupy the whole parent's view's available space. In other words, click on a view's title bar, it will both open/unfold this view and close/fold the currently open view, with animations'n'all. Oh end, I need the views' contents to be scrollable.
I tried starting from Apple's NSStackView sample code, but first it is not quite what I want, and what's more, I can't figure out how to start from here to end up where I eventually want to be.
Then I tried to master the Auto-Layout facilities but with no success. Truth be told, this whole Auto-Layout thing still confuses me some.
Does any of you have clues as to how I should proceed? Sample code? Tutorials (I tried several Auto-Layout tutorial but at the end of the day they still leave me missing the tricks I'd need to figure...).
Thanks.
/Julian
Check out the sample code: InfoBarStackView. It creates an accordion-like interface, the one difference from what you're describing is it lets multiple views be revealed at the same time (although, that's a simple difference).
It uses NSStackView and autolayout constraints to create the interface and drive the reveal/hide animations.
The stack view could also be put into an NSScrollView to allow the content to be scrollable. (Something similar was done during a WWDC 2013 Cocoa Animation talk).
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 have just recently began learning Swift and Xcode and I have just started programming my first app. At the moment I am using .hidden to hide and show UI elements when the user taps on different functions to switch between different scenes. This seems very messy and unnecessary so I've been trying to figure out a better way to do it. I was experimenting with different things and discovered segues but I am not sure how I would switch to a new scene within a tab without losing the tab bar at the bottom?
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
I thought I would answer my own question now that I have been programming in Swift for a few months now and the answer is obvious...
Rather than hiding and unhiding individual objects, just drag a UIView into the view controller and you can add objects to that. You then simply need to hide the view, to which all of the objects are attached.
I'm having all kinds of trouble understanding how NSWindows can have larger documents than the window bounds in them.
Unfortunately, layout and contents prevents me from simply shrinking the document (and I wouldn't want to make the layout cramped for those with larger screens).
A school needs to run this app on their new 13", non-retina MacBook Pros. Scrolling is acceptable to them, but I'm unsure as to the approach, and I'd like your advice on the best way to handle this to avoid forced scrolling on larger screens.
I've tried setting the NSWindow min and max size and embedding the document in a Scroll View. But even though you can see part of the document view sticking out, no scroll bars appear (I have set them to Always in sys prefs).
If this is the way to go I would appreciate a link to a tutorial on this exact subject, because I'm a bit lost with all the measurements and options.
If not I'd like a pointer where to start and what to read. I'm experienced with Cocoa Touch but a relative newcomer to Mac development.
Without more information it sounds like you have embedded a NSScrollView but didn't set up the springs and struts properly to allow the scroll view to resize when its parent view (assuming it's the window) resizes.
You might want to check out Specifying a View’s Behavior as Its Container Resizes in the Interface Builder Help documentation.
Although I know of a solution to this problem, I am interested if someone can explain this solution to me. I also wanted to get this out there because I could not find any mention of this problem online, and it took me several hours over several days to track down. I have an NSTableView behaving strangely regarding redraws and its selection. The problem looks like this:
Table contents fades in, instead of appearing instantly upon it's appearance on screen. When scrolling through the contents, the newly appearing rows also fade in. When you make a selection (single or multiple), and scroll it off screen, then make another selection (that should replace, not add-to first selection), the first selection does not get cleared properly. If you scroll back to it, it is still there, in addition to your new selection. This is a display-update problem, not selection problem - i.e. your new selection is valid, it is just displayed wrong.
I tracked this through the NSArrayController I was binding to, the underlying Array, sorting, all the connections, and settings, etc., but all that has nothing to do with it.
What solved the problem was:
In the View Effects (right-most) Inspector, uncheck "Core Animation Layer" for the Window's main view.
Can anyone explain what is happening here, and perhaps improve upon the solution ?
It looks like Core Animation and NSTableView aren't getting along so well. The "fading" effect is a by-product of the way core animation works. When you have core animation in one view, it is also enabled in all of that view's subviews.
I don't recommend using core animation on the Mac unless absolutely necessary, because some interface elements (NSTextView and NSTableView, for example) aren't compatible with it. iOS has much better support for table views and such using core animation, mainly because it was designed with core animation in mind.
I know that some more simple UI elements are compatible (NSTextField and NSButton, for example).
If you absolutely need core animation in the rest of the window, put all the other views in a subview of the content view, while leaving the table view directly in the content view. You can then enable Core Animation in the other view.
Commenters, feel free to add to the list of what is and isn't compatible.
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.