I've got a sample project at:
http://ericgorr.net/cocoadev/tooltip.zip
What I would like to do is define a single tooltip rect for an entire view but be able to change the tooltip as the cursor moves inside of the view.
Is there a way to do that? Is there a way to force it to hide the current tooltip and display a new one while calling view:stringForToolTip:point:userData:?
I could create my own window that simulates a real tooltip, but wanted to make sure there was nothing built-in that would support this.
Check the MAAttachedWindow sample project:
http://mattgemmell.com/source/
Great start for creating custom tooltips.
NSView has specific handlers for mouse events.
Simply change the NSView (tooltip) based on these events.
I added some snippets to get you started.
- (void)mouseMove:(NSEvent *)theEvent {
NSPoint mousePositionInWindow = [theEvent locationInWindow];
}
- (void)mouseDown:(NSEvent *)theEvent {
}
- (void)mouseDragged:(NSEvent *)theEvent {
}
- (void)mouseUp:(NSEvent *)theEvent {
}
Response to comment:
Once I struggled with exactly the same problem: One view with continuous tooltip updates showing the cursor position and some additional information. I got it never working with the native tooltips. Finally i came up with the solution above, which is easy to implement and made it even look better.
Instead of using the separate window, you can also draw the custom tooltip inside the NSView itself, in relation to the cursor position. You can also put an extra NSView on top of the existing NSView to show the custom tooltips.
I don't like the native tooltip behavior. Apparently they have build-in time-delays which cannot be changed, for example: The cursor has to be on one position for some time to show the tooltip for the first time. Once the first tooltip showed up, the next will show with much less delay, but it's still quite annoying.
Of cours, you can always show the info in a label located near the view, which is really easy to implement. But that is no real answer to your question :)
Related
I wanted to change the cursor in my cocoa application. I've followed the example in this answer, with success.
I have an NSView, let's call it NSViewA, behind another NSView, NSViewB. NSViewA contains a subclassed NSButton where the cursor has been changed. NSViewA and NSViewB have the same superview. So something like this:
- NSWindow
- NSViewA
- NSButtonSubclass
- NSViewB
My problem is that when NSViewB is shown, and the cursor is ontop of NSViewB, but in the same x y coordinates of the NSButton behind NSViewB, the cursor changes to that specified in the NSButton subclass.
How do I stop this behaviour?
The reason for this layout is that I'm creating a 'lightbox' control. If you think something along the lines of the NSWindow greying out, and a centred box appearing showing an error message. That sort of thing.
I previously had a problem where you could still click buttons, etc, behind NSViewB. This was solved by suppressing mouseDown: and mouseUp:. I've tried doing something similar with other mouse-related events, such as mouseEntered: and mouseExited: with no luck.
Could you make the addition of your custom cursor rectangle contingent on the enabled status of your button? In other words, your resetCursorRects would look like this:
// MyButton.swift
override func resetCursorRects() {
if enabled {
addCursorRect(bounds, cursor: NSCursor.pointingHandCursor())
}
}
Whenever viewB is about to be shown, disable the button, and call for the rects belonging to your button to be invalidated. If you're using Swift, you could do this second bit in a property observer attached to the enabled property itself:
// MyButton.swift
override var enabled: Bool {
didSet {
window!.invalidateCursorRectsForView(self)
}
}
If you don't want your button to take on a disabled look, make the addCursorRect call contingent on some other flag.
This is for a Mac app written with Cocoa and Objective-C.
I have a custom NSView class that essentially works as a collection of buttons and stores the value of the selected button. Sort of like an NSSlider that snaps to the tick marks but with buttons instead of a slider. The image below on the left is what it looks like.
Now what I want to do is make it so that when the mouse moves over each button, it covers that button with a semi-transparent blue color that then stays there when it is clicked. I've made a few attempts and you can see the latest result in the image on the right:
This is what happens after mousing over all the buttons. For some reason it draws using the window's origin instead of drawing inside the MyButtonView. Also, it is not semi-transparent. I haven't yet worried about redrawing the normal button when the mouse leaves the rectangle since this part isn't working yet anyway.
Now here's the pertinent code.
Inside the initWithFrame method of the MyButtonView class:
for (int i = 0; i < 12; i++) {
yOrigin = kBorderSize + (buttonHeight * i) + (kSeparatorSize * i);
NSRect newRect = { {xOrigin, yOrigin}, {buttonWidth, buttonHeight} };
[buttonRectangles addObject:NSStringFromRect(newRect)];
[self addTrackingRect:newRect owner:self userData:NULL assumeInside:NO];
}
The methods that draw the blue rectangles:
- (void)mouseEntered:(NSEvent *)theEvent {
NSRect rect = [[theEvent trackingArea] rect];
[self drawHoverRect:rect withColor:hoverBlue];
}
- (void)drawHoverRect:(NSRect)rect withColor:(NSColor *)color {
[color set];
NSRectFill(rect);
[self displayRect:rect];
}
I have no idea how to do this. I've been poring over Apple's documentation for a few hours and can't figure it out. Obviously though, I'm no veteran to Cocoa or Objective-C so I would love some help.
One fundamental problem you have is that you are bypassing the normal drawing mechanisms and trying to force the drawing yourself. This is a common mistake for first timers. Before you go any further, you should read Apple's View Programming Guide:
https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/CocoaViewsGuide/Introduction/Introduction.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40002978
If you have trouble with that, then you might need to back up and start with some of the more fundamental Objective-C/Cocoa guides and documentation.
Back to your actual view, one thing that you are going to have to do in this view is do all your drawing in the drawRect: method. You should be tracking the state of your mouse movements via some kind of data structure and then drawing according to that data structure in your drawRect: method. You will call
[self setNeedsDisplay:YES];
in your mouse tracking method(s), after you've recorded whatever change has occurred in your data structure. If you only want to ever draw one button highlighted at a time, then your data structure could be as simple as an NSInteger whose value you set to the index of your selected button (or -1 or whatever to indicate no selection).
For the sake of learning, the reason your blue boxes are currently drawing from the window's origin is that you are calling drawing code outside of the "context" that's normally setup for your view when drawRect: is called by the system. That "context" would include a translation to move the current origin to the origin of your view, rather than the origin of the window.
I'm using a view-based NSTableView with a custom NSTableRowView. I would like to use custom row background drawing via drawBackgroundInRect, based upon mouse location using trackingAreas. The goal is to draw a custom background for the unselected row the mouse is currently hovering over.
This is virtually identical to the HoverTableView example from the WWDC 2011 session View Based NSTableView Basic to Advanced. You can see that behavior in action in the Mail, Contacts & Calendars System Preferences Pane in the account types table view on the right.
Unlike the examples, I have thousands of rows in my table view. Everything works as in the examples unless I scroll the table view rapidly (e.g., with a two-finger flick via trackpad). In this case, it seems that updateTrackingAreas is not called fast enough. Rows that scroll under the mouse get highlighted but are never notified that the mouse left their tracking area and therefore remain highlighted. The result is mulitple rows showing the mouse-over highlight and, due to the reuse queue, these will scroll off one end of the table view and reappear on the other (with different data of course) still highlighted as if they are moused-over. Scrolling slowly eliminates the problem; but considering I expect to scroll thousands and thousands of rows, scrolling slowly is not an expected user behavior.
I've tried various combinations of NSTrackingAreaOptions to no avail and am now stumped. Any suggestions on to solve this issue would be appreciated.
I think the answer to the question is "you cannot," i.e., that updateTrackingAreas for NSTableRowView in a fast-scrolling NSTableView does not happen consistently fast enough on the run loop to rely upon it for determining if the pointer is inside a row view or not. Again, see the HoverTableView example code to see where updateTrackingAreas is being used.
I do think I have a suitable solution though. I noticed that Twitter for Mac (RIP) has mouse-over views that appear with mouse movement but disappear on scroll, very similar to the mouse-over highglight I was hoping to achieve.
To execute this, I basically made my custom NSTableRowView have a delegate (my custom NSTableViewController) whom it would ask if it should highlight on hover. I used a custom NSScrollView for my NSTableView and called
[self.contentView setPostsBoundsChangedNotifications:YES];
in its awakeFromNib and also made it register self as the observer of that notification. On receiving that notification, which implies that my table view is scrolling, my custom NSScrollView forwards a message to my NSTableViewController.
When my NSTableViewController receives the message that the table view is scrolling, it disables highlighting on mouse-over and, if there is not already a valid timer running from a previous notification, fires a short timer to reenable highlight on mouse-over once scrolling has stopped. As an extra precaution, at state transitions between enable and disable highlight on mouse-over, my NSTableViewController uses enumerateAvailableRowViewsUsingBlock to clear mouseInside for every row view.
Not sure if this is necessarily the best way, but it achieves the effect I wanted.
The solution for this issue is described here: mouseExited isn't called when mouse leaves trackingArea while scrolling
My updateTrackingAreas method now looks like:
- (void)updateTrackingAreas {
if (trackingArea)
[self removeTrackingArea:trackingArea];
[trackingArea release];
trackingArea = [[NSTrackingArea alloc] initWithRect:NSZeroRect
options:NSTrackingInVisibleRect |
NSTrackingActiveAlways |
NSTrackingMouseEnteredAndExited
owner:self
userInfo:nil];
[self addTrackingArea:trackingArea];
NSPoint mouseLocation = [[self window] mouseLocationOutsideOfEventStream];
mouseLocation = [self convertPoint: mouseLocation fromView: nil];
if (NSPointInRect(mouseLocation, [self bounds]))
[self mouseEntered:nil];
else
[self mouseExited:nil];
[super updateTrackingAreas];
}
I'm placing a few buttons in a simple rectangular NSview which acts as a custom toolbar. On first render the buttons/views come out as expected, but every time a button is pressed (and sometimes with no mouse interaction at all) artefacts start appearing.
Before
After
I can eliminate the artefacts by calling a [self.toolbarView setNeedsDisplay:YES] in all the action and focus methods but this seems like a hack, is there any clean way to deal with this?
It was a beginner's problem. In the drawRect method
- (void)drawRect:(NSRect)dirtyRect
I was using the param dirtyRect for drawing an outline of my view, assuming it was the view's bounds, where in fact it was only the area around the buttons that became dirty when they were pressed. The 'artefacts' were actually my outline being drawn in the wrong place.
By correctly using the bounds of the view
NSRect drawingRect = [self bounds];
the 'artefacts' no longer appeared.
You just try to set focus ring for a buttons to 'none' in IB.
I want to disallow dropping anything into my NSTextField. In my app, users can drag and drop iCal events into a different part of the GUI. Now I've had a test user who accidentally dropped the iCal event into the text field – but he didn't realize this because the text is inserted in the lines above the one that I see in my one-line text field.
(You can reveal the inserted text by clicking into the text field and using the keyboard to go one line up – but a normal user wouldn't do this because he/she wouldn't even have realized that something got inserted in the first place!)
I tried registerForDraggedTypes:[NSArray array]] (doesn't seem to have any effect) as well as implementing the draggingEntered: delegate method returning NSDragOperationNone (the delegate method isn't even invoked).
Any ideas?
EDIT: Of course dropping something onto an NSTextField only works when it has focus, as described by ssp in his blog and in the comments to a blog entry by Daniel Jalkut.
I am glad you discovered the comments in my blog post. I think they are the tip of the iceberg to discovering how to achieve what you're looking for.
You need to keep in mind that the reason dragging to an NSTextField works when it has focus, is that the NSTextField has itself been temporarily obscured by a richer, more powerful view (an NSTextView), which is called the "Field Editor."
Check out this section of Apple's documentation on the field editor:
https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/TextEditing/Tasks/FieldEditor.html
To achieve what you're striving for, I think you might need to intercept the standard provision of the field editor for your NSTextFields, by implementing the window delegate method:
windowWillReturnFieldEditor:toObject:
This gives you the opportunity to either tweak the configuration on the NSTextView, or provide a completely new field editor object.
In the worst case scenario, you could provide your own NSTextView subclass as the field editor, which was designed to reject all drags.
This might work: If you subclass NSTextView and implement -acceptableDragTypes to return nil, then the text view will be disabled as a drag destination. I also had to implement the NSDraggingDestination methods -draggingEntered: and -draggingUpdated: to return NSDragOperationNone.
#implementation NoDragTextView
- (NSArray *)acceptableDragTypes
{
return nil;
}
- (NSDragOperation)draggingEntered:(id<NSDraggingInfo>)sender
{
return NSDragOperationNone;
}
- (NSDragOperation)draggingUpdated:(id<NSDraggingInfo>)sender
{
return NSDragOperationNone;
}
#end
I was able to solve this problem by creating a custom NSTextView and implementing the enter and exit NSDraggingDestination protocol methods to set the NSTextView to hidden. Once the text field is hidden the superview will be able to catch the drag/drop events, or if the superview doesn't implement or want the drag/drop they are discarded
For example:
- (NSDragOperation)draggingEntered:(id<NSDraggingInfo>)sender {
//hide so that the drop event falls through into superview's drag/drop view
[self setHidden:YES];
return NSDragOperationNone;
}
- (void)draggingExited:(id<NSDraggingInfo>)sender {
//show our field editor again since dragging is all over with
[self setHidden:NO];
}
Have you tried - (void)unregisterDraggedTypes from NSView?