How can I add text on top of a NSLevelIndicator? [the NSLevelIndicator is in my statusbar, if that matters]
The best way to add text to your NSLevelIndicator user interface is by adding a separate Label NSTextField. The NSLevelIndicator control does not have a title or other text associated with it.
From within Interface Builder, just grab a Label and drag it to your window above or beside the NSLevelIndicator.
Contrary to the correct answer to your previous question, if you want to use an NSLevelIndicator as a background and draw text on top of it, you're better off creating a custom view that owns and uses an NSLevelIndicatorCell for the background drawing.
You might also consider drawing the background yourself; e.g., fill with your choice of green/yellow/red, and then draw a white gradient on top of it. This is more appropriate if you're not really indicating a level with your level indicator.
Also, don't forget to test your application with Sim Daltonism, to make sure that the text is still readable to color-blind users.
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I am a rookie Cocoa guy. I need to design and implement a view which will show collection of labels on Mac OS using Xamarin. These labels will have a text and color associated with them. When shown inside the view, label should expand till it covers whole text and it will be shown with background and foreground colors.
I have attached the picture of this user control on Windows, you can see that labels inside the StackPanel are expanding till they cover the whole text. Hope this gives better idea about my ask.
The $64,000 question is "are these labels controls?" In other words, do you expect the user to click on these to do something, or are they just for display?
If your answer is "just for display", the solution is super simple: Use an NSTextField and programmatically add attributed text (NSAttributedString) to it. Attributed text attaches display properties to runs of text within the field; properties like "background color".
If you want these to be buttons that you can click on, then things get a lot more complicated.
Since you apparently want the button layout to "flow", you might look into imbedding buttons (well, button cells) into an NSTextField using attachments. This is normally how non-text content (say, an image) can be inserted, but with some fiddling it can actually be anything a control cell can draw. See How to insert a NSButton into a NSTextView? (inline).
Warning: this is not a "rookie" topic and will involve control cells and custom event handling.
If I were doing this, I'd probably just create NSButton objects for each label (choosing an appropriate style/look like NSRecessedBezelStyle), create a custom subclass of NSView to contain them, and then override the layout method to position all of the buttons the way I want.
To be thorough, I'd also override the intrinsic size methods so the whole thing could participate in auto-layout, based on the number and size of buttons it contained.
When the NSLevelIndicator (in star ratings mode) is interacted with it shows placeholder dots for where there are no stars. These dots however fade once the interaction with the NSLevelIndicator is seized. This brings with it obvious UI problems because the user is no longer aware that there is a NSLevelIndicator to be interacted with. Is there any way to force the continuous highlighting of the indicator so that the dots do not fade?
I found an answer here: http://www.cocoabuilder.com/archive/cocoa/202167-rating-style-levelindicator-not-showing-dots.html
Basically the control's cell needs to have its 'highlighted' property set to YES for the dots to show. Their solution involves subclassing NSLevelIndicatorCell; I found a simpler way that seems to work fine, which is to set the control's cell's highlight to YES when it's initially created, and after it's clicked and sends its action message. (You have to keep highlighting it because it loses the highlight after each click for some reason.)
I am in the process of creating a small image editor.
What I aim, is to create a window with transparent titlebar, but not what contains inside the window.
I have check HUD Window, but it's really is a panel, not a window. And I am missing the regular close,maximize and minimize button.
Is there anyway to create such window?
Or can we modify HUD to hold regular close,max and min button?
Thanks so much in advance!
Eko
Use a standard borderless window approach and provide a content view that draws something. Even if the content view's bounds rect is just filled with [NSColor whiteColor].
Update: Re-reading, I see you seem to be asking for just a transparent title bare but still with the window controls. See this StackOverflow question for an approach at customizing a window's title bar. Careful, though - I'm not sure this would be accepted into the App Store. Best to have a backup plan in case it's not.
Here is what I found that match to what I want : window trasparency
The trick is making the main window transparent, but not the content by creating a special view for this.
I've got a NSTextView where I'd like to control drawing of the highlight/selection. Anyone know which method I have to overwrite so I can control what to draw in the selection rect?
You do not specify what you want to draw, so it's not easy to give you a straight answer.
If it's just an attributed string (Font, Style, Color, Background), you do not need anything fancy, just look for NSAttributedString. There are methods like -setSelectedTextAttributes: and the delegate method -textViewDidChangeSelection:
Generally, you should not subclass NSTextView if you don't have a very good reason to do so. You can do almost anything by just utilizing the usual delegation mechanisms.
If it's something very customized, there is a variety of possibilities depending on if you want to customize the selection (-setSelectedRange:) draw an overlay view (get the frame of the selectedRange) or mess around with the low level layout engine (-layoutManager). It really depends.
If you don't want to use the standard attributes to highlight text, eg by using an CALayer, you can get the rects containing the selection from the layoutManager of the NSTextView.
I have some static text that is usually only 1 line long that displays in a NSTextField in my xib. In some instances, the text is long enough to warrant 2 lines, and I just want the label to resize vertically to fit it, without giving me scrollers or any thing else. Think of how text on a webpage behaves… that is what I want. I just want the label to grow shrink with different text, and with adjustments to its width. How can I achieve this?
UPDATE
Here is a video of how it currently behaves: http://screencast.com/t/4JYTv7jVG3O
Notice how when the NSTextField is two lines long, there is a big gap underneath the text. This is because the stars and button are aligned at the bottom of the frame, and because I have to have the frame taller to accommodate 2 lines, they stay there. If I can get an answer to this question, I would make the frame shorter for the 1 line text, and make the bottom textfield (with the smaller text) taller to compensate. Can this type of floating layout be done?
One option is to actually use a WebView to display your content. You will then get exactly the behaviour you are expecting, at the cost of a bit of work to manage interaction with the controls.
You would need to set the WebView to display no background, using [webView setDrawsBackground:NO].
You'd also need to construct the content (including the star rating and the button) using HTML/CSS and then use the Objective-C/JavaScript bridge to call back to your app when the button is pressed.
More information on calling Objective-C from JavaScript is here.
You could probably also use an NSTextView and embed the button and star rating as NSTextAttachment objects but this is quite complex, it would be a lot easier to use a WebView.
The only other alternative that I can see is writing a view controller that manages the layout of the controls based on the current size of their container view. You would need to measure the text to do this and one way to do that is to use the excellent NS(Attributed)String+Geometrics category written by Jerry Krinock.