Display NSWindow as Subview of NSView - cocoa

I have an NSWindow that I want to display as part of another window. It has to be an NSWindow; I don't want to change it to an NSView or anything... I just don't because it involves accessing foreign nib files and the such.
How should I accomplish this if possible? I was thinking along the lines of grabbing the view of the NSWindow and sticking it as the subview of another view in my main window... but I don't think this is possible. Is it?

If you're okay with the window as-is, just add it as a child window to the window in your own app. That will handle positioning and everything, although you might have to patch up the responder chain and such to really get things working properly.

Related

Add an NSView around cursor?

Simple question, starting out with macOS stuff – I’d like to create a small radial menu around my cursor, top-most, above whatever application is currently active, whenever a specific mouse button is pressed.
I have the specific mouse button over all application down, but I’m wondering where I need to draw that NSView, i.e. “topmost”. I guess on iOS this would be at the UIWindow level, but would NSWindow be the wrong approach here?
this is purely an opinion-based question, but basically if you want to present any custom content on the desktop, that should use NSWindow, and you can customise the window's content for your wish.
NOTE: you can find more information about the NSWindow class in Apple's Class Reference Docs.

How to tell what's causing drawRect to be called?

I've got my custom NSView with a bunch of custom buttons in it, the buttons are added as a subView in the NSView's drawRect method.
Now I'm finding that after pressing a button the drawRect of the parent view is repeatedly called. Sometimes it only stops when I quit the app - I know this from a simple log statement in drawRect.
Now I know there are probably bigger architectural issues in my app causing this, where do I go to begin tracking down what's causing this view to be repeatedly redrawn?
Thanks!
First of all you shouldn't be adding subviews in drawRect:.
Are you doing any custom drawing or are you just adding subviews? If you're not doing any drawing, you should not implement drawRect:.
You want to add the subviews in initWithFrame: and then you want to set the frames of the subviews in layoutSubviews based on self.bounds.
If you have any questions, feel free to ask.
EDIT: Just realized that you were asking about NSView and not UIView. I've never used NSView, but perhaps they work similarly.
EDIT 2: I read a bit about NSView and it doesn't seem to have layoutSubviews. Perhaps you should set the frames in drawRect:? I'm still pretty sure you don't want to add subviews in drawRect:.

Switch XIB Views - Cocoa Mac

I am pretty new to coding and would like to know how to switch XIB views on a button click. IS there also anyway to add animation when switching?
Thanks,
Kevin
this is totally possible, but there are a few things you'll need to do. I imagine you are already familiar with connecting outlets to objects in your XIB, so the first thing you need to do is create the custom views in your XIB and connect them to outlets in your appDelegate. I suggest that one of the views be dragged into the window and one one be outside the window. That way, when the window loads, it already has one of your custom views as a subview. This just makes it easier to get started.
Then you're going to write an IBAction in the appDelegate and connect it to your button. Assuming that one of the custom views is already being hosted by the window, the IBAction should send a replaceSubviewWith message to the window's contentView animator like this [[window.contentView animator] replaceSubview:firstView with:secondView]; where firstView and secondView are the pointer/outlets that you declared and connected to the views in your XIB.
This is sending the animator proxy of the window's content view a message which tells it to replace the old subview with the new one. The reason for sending the message to the view's animator proxy (and not the view itself) is that the transition will be carried out with the deafult CATransitionAnimation. Because you want it to be animated, right?
The reason why you shouldn't remove one subview and then add another is because animating the removal of a subview is actually quite tricky and requires the implementation of the delegate method animationDidEnd. This is because executing an animation on a view that has been removed from the view heirarchy does not make sense. I don't know why Apple hasn't changed this, but for now it will be one of the enduring quirks of CoreAnimation.
Let me know if that helps. I am happy to clarify! And welcome to Cocoa!
An easy way to do this is to use a tabless NSTabView- you can lay everything out in IB so the pain is minimal.

NSTextView overlay causes oddities with first responder status

I have an NSTextView in an NSScrollView, and I am programmatically inserting an NSView subclass as a subview of the NSTextView. This NSView acts as an overlay, superimposing graphical information about the text beneath it.
I thought it was working quite well until I noticed that the text view does not respond to right clicks. Other operations (editing, selection) seem to work just fine.
Also, if the first responder is changed to a sibling of the scroll view (an outline view, for example) the text view does not regain first responder status from clicking on it. The selection will change in response to clicking, but the selection highlight is gray instead of blue (indicating that the text view is not the first responder).
If I offset the frame of the overlay subview, the text view behaves 100% normally in the area not overlapped by the overlay, but the overlapped area behaves incorrectly, as outlined above.
Steps To Replicate This Behavior on Mac OS X 10.6.4:
Create a plain old non-document-based Cocoa app.
Add an `NSTextView' IBOutlet to the app delegate .h.
Add an NSTextView to the window in MainMenu.xib. Connect the textView outlet.
Type in a bit of code:
In applicationDidFinishLaunching:
NSView *overlay = [[NSView alloc] initWithFrame:textView.bounds];
[textView addSubview:overlay];
[overlay release];
Run the app, observe that right click in the text area does not work as it should, yet you can still otherwise interact with the text view.
Next, add an NSOutlineView to the window in the xib. Observe that once focus leaves the text area (if you click on the outline view) with the overlay in place, you cannot set the focus back to the text view (it will not become first responder again).
Is there some way I can enable the NSTextView to receive all of its events, even though my NSView overlay does not accept first responder or mouse events? I suspect this might be related to the field editor – perhaps it is ignoring events it thinks are destined to the overlay view?
You probably need to make your overlay an instance of a custom view class that forwards all events and accessibility messages to the text view. You may also need to convert any view-relative coordinates to the text view's coordinate system.
I don't have a lot of experience with it, but another possibility would be to use a Core Animation layer as an overlay.
A clean way to handle this is by making your overlay view a custom subclass of NSView, and then overriding the hitTest: method to always return nil. This will prevent the overlay view from participating in the responder chain. Instead, events will get sent automatically to it's superview or views higher up the view hierarchy. You might also want to override acceptsFirstResponder to return NO to be safe (in case it's accidentally set programatically).

Autosizing boxes and positioning in Cocoa

I'm creating an application, from which a part looks like this:
boo http://img188.imageshack.us/img188/7808/schermafbeelding2010021y.png
I all dragged them to a window in IB, but the problem is that the NSImageView, Action Buttons (Suggest, Send, Poke etc...), Information NSBox, and Friends NSTabView can all vary in height. They should always be placed below each other, with a margin of 8px. Just like on Facebook. I thought of a very modified NSSplitView, but maybe there are easier ways. Can anyone help me out?
Edit: I have placed the action buttons in a Custom View with class NSView.
Thanks
You'll have to manually resize the views yourself. Cocoa does not provide Java-style LayoutManagers. However, I don't think it would be too hard to recreate one...

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