I'm looking to add two finger "fluid swiping" to my app. Anyone who has used the week view in the Calendar app that comes with OSX will have seen what I'm trying to do.
I have a scroll view, and I want to be able to use swipe gestures and scrolling to move the content view in the horizontal axis of my NSScrollView, ie a day or a week.
The video from WWDC 2011 titled "Scrolling, Swiping, Dragging: Now with more animation" was quite useful, and looks like it will be able to explain what I want to do, but unfortunately the sample code for PictureSwiper isn't provided with the video.
I'm aware that a newer version of PictureSwiper is avaliable, but it uses NSPageController and I'm really looking for the older Lion 10.7 way of handling things as I can't use NSPageController. Is it still possible to find the old PictureSwiper somewhere?
If not could someone explain how the PictureSwiper sample on Lion worked? I'm aware of the App note https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#releasenotes/Cocoa/AppKitOlderNotes.html (search for "scrollWheel:") but that has only gone part of the way to explaining the kind of functionality I am after.
Many thanks for any help.
David.
For anyone looking to this for an answer I eventually used one of my "Developer Technical Support" queries that came with my paid Dev account to ask for the old code. A few days latter an Apple engineer emailed me the old Picture Swiper.
Now that I have seen the code the App note makes complete sense! Picture Swiper moves CALayers around, but in my case I just use NSClipView's scrollToPoint:.
Within the scroll handler I just do something like: (gestureAmount * columnWidth) + currentColumnIndexOffset.
Seems to work!
Hey all, quick question that has been bugging me about NSPanel. I like the look of The NSPanel HUD but for the project I am doing I need the Panel to not be moved. Does anyone know of any possible solutions to make it were my NSPanel cannot be moved at all but maintain its buttons interactivity? I've been searching for any questions similar to this for awhile now. Any insight on the issue would be helpful! Thanks.
Don't forget to look in superclasses. A panel is a kind of window, and since Mac OS X 10.6, it's possible to set a window's movable property to NO.
I'm with Dave DeLong, though: I hope you have a good reason to break this functionality. Users expect to be able to move windows, especially those with title bars and HUD windows by their backgrounds, out of their way. And remember, you're not the only application on the system; the user may have something important to get to in a window in another application.
I'm from a Windows programming background when writing tools, but have been programming using Carbon and Cocoa for the past year. I have introduced myself to Mac by, I admit it, hiding from UI programming. I've been basically wapping my OpenGL code in a view, then staying in my comfort zone using my platform agnostic OpenGL C++ code as usual.
However, now I want to start porting one of my more sophisticated applications to Mac OS.
Typically I use the standard Visual Studio dockable MDI approach, which is excellent, but very Windows-like. From using a Mac primarily now for a while, I don't tend to see this sort of method used for Mac UIs. Even Xcode doesn't support the idea of drag and drop/dockable views, unfortunately. I see docked views with splitter panels, but that's about it.
The closest thing I've seen to the Visual Studio approach is Photoshop CS4, which is pretty nice.
So what is the general consensus on this? Is there are more Mac-like way of achieving the same thing that I haven't seen? If not, I'm happy to write a window manager in Cocoa myself, so that I can finally delve in an learn what looks like an excellent API.
Note, I don't want to use QT or any other cross-platform libraries. The whole point is that I want to make a Mac app look like a Mac app, leave the Windows app looking like a Windows app. I always find the cross-platform libraries tend to lose this effect, and when I see a native Mac UI, with fancy Cocoa transitions and animations, I always smile. It's also a good excuse for me to learn Cocoa.
That being said, if there is an Open Source Cocoa library to do this, I'd love to know about it! I'd love to see how someone else achieves this, and would help smooth the Cocoa learning curve.
Cheers,
Shane
UPDATE: I forgot to mention a critical point. I support plugins, which can have their own UI to display various plugin specific information. I don't know which plugins will be loaded and I don't know where their UI will live, if I don't support docking. I'd love to hear people's thoughts on this, specifically: How do I support a plugin view architecture, if the UI can't change? Where do I put the plugin views?
Coming from a Windows background, you feel the need to have docking windows, but is it really essential to the app? Apple's philosophy (in my opinion) is that the designer knows better than the user how things should look and work. For example, iTunes is a pretty sophisticated app, but it doesn't let you change the UI around, change the skin, etc., because Apple wants to keep it consistent. They offer the full view, the mini player, and a handful of different viewing options, but they don't let you pull the source list off into a separate window, or dock it in other positions. They think it should be on the left, so there it stays...
You said you "want to make a Mac app look like a Mac app", and as you pointed out, Mac apps don't tend to have docking windows. Therefore, implementing your own docking windows is probably a step in the wrong direction ;)
+1 to Ken's answer.
From a user perspective unless its integral to the app like it is in Adobe CS or Eclipse i want everything as concise as possible and all the different options and displays out of my way so i can focus on the document.
I think you will find with mac users that those who have the "user skill" to make use of rearranging panels will in most cases opt for hot key bindings instead, and those who dont have that level of "skill" youre just going to confuse.
I would recommend keeping it as simple as possible.
One thing that's common among many Mac apps is the ability to hide all the chrome and focus on your content. That's the point behind the "tic tac" toolbar control in the top right corner of many windows. A serious weakness of many docking UIs is that they expect you to have the window take up most of the screen, because the docked panels can obscure content. Even if docked panels are collapsable, the space left by them is often just wasted and filled with white space. So, if you build a docking panel into your interface, you should expect it to be visible most of the time. For example, iTunes' source list is clearly designed to be visible all the time, but you can double-click a playlist to open it in a new window.
To get used to the range of Mac controls, I'd suggest you try doing some serious work with some apps that don't have a cross-platform UI; for example, the iWork apps, Interface Builder or Preview. Take note of where controls appear and why—in toolbars, in bottom bars, in inspectors, in source lists/sidebars, in panels such as IB's Library or the Font and Color panels, in contextual HUDs. Don't forget the menu bar either. Get an idea of the feel of controls—their responsiveness, modality, sizing, grouping and consistency. Try to develop some taste—not everything is perfect; just try iCal if you want to have something to make fun of.
Note that there's no "one size fits all" for controls, which can be an issue with docking UIs. It's important to think about workflow: how commonly used the control would be, whether you can replace it with direct manipulation, whether a visible indication of its state is necessary, whether it's operable from the keyboard and mouse where appropriate, and so forth. Figure out how the control's placement and behavior lets the user work more efficiently.
As a simple example of example of a good versus bad control placement and behavior in otherwise-decent applications, compare image masking in OmniGraffle and Keynote. In OmniGraffle, this uses the Image inspector where you have to first click on an unlabeled button ("Natural size") in order to enable the appropriate controls, then adjust size and position away in a low-fidelity fashion with an image thumbnail or by typing percentages into fields. Trying to resize the frame directly behaves in a bizarre and counterintuitive fashion.
In Keynote, masking starts with a sensibly named menu item or toolbar item, uses a HUD which pops up the instant you click on a masked image and allows for direct manipulation including a sensible display of the extent of the image you're masking. While you're dragging a masked image around, it even follows the guides. Advanced users can ignore the HUD entirely, just double-clicking the image to toggle mask editing and using the handles for sizing. It should be easy to see, with a few caveats (e.g. the state of "Edit Mask" mode should be visible in the HUD rather than just from the image; the outer border of the image you're masking should be more effectively used) Keynote is substantially better at this, in part because it doesn't use an inspector.
That said, if you do have a huge number of options and the standard tabbed inspector layout doesn't work for you, check out the Omni Group's OmniInspector framework. Try to use it for good, and hopefully you'll figure out how to obsess over UI as much as you do over graphics now :-)
(running in slow motion, reaching out in panic) Nnnnnoooooooo!!!!!
:-) Seriously, as I mentioned in reply to Ken's excellent answer, trying to force a "Windowsism" on an OS X UI is definitely a bad idea. In my opinion, the biggest problem with Windows UI is third-party developers inventing new and inconsistent ways of presenting UI, rather than being consistent and following established conventions. To a Mac user, that's the sign of a terrible application. It's that way for a reason.
I encourage you to rethink your UI app's implementation from the ground up with the Mac OS in mind. If you've done your job well, the architecture and model (sans platform-specific implementation) should clearly translate to any platform.
In terms of UI, you've been using a Mac for a year, so you should have a pretty good idea of "the norm". If you have doubts, it's best to post a question specifically detailing what you need to present and your thoughts on how you might do it (or asking how if you have no idea).
Just don't whack your app with the ugly stick by forcing it to behave as if it were running in Windows when it's clearly not. That's the kiss of death for an app to Mac users.
It seems like there is a lot of online information regarding switching between views in Cocoa Touch, but not that many in "desktop" Cocoa. For an app I am creating, I am wondering the pros/cons of the methods (and please list the methods if you could), and which one people personally use/suggest. I don't think that using an invisible border NSTabView will do the trick for this specific app, but I value all your options. I will be changing the view with some buttons at the side as show in iPhoto, iTunes, and generally most Mac apps out there.
Thanks for any help.
EDIT: I have looked into using NSViewController, but am wondering what advice anyone has about how to use this/why not to use this.
Cathy Shive has created a framework called KTUIKit which was designed with single window applications modeled after iPhoto/iTunes/etc. The KTTabViewController class in particular may be of interest, as it provides a way of switching between an arbitrary number of subviews. They provide a formal way of dealing with nesting views, keeping the responder chain intact, and keeping various notifications properly observed/unobserved. There are also a series of blog posts describing some of the reasoning behind the design and how the classes work (the blog posts refer to them with an "XS" prefix instead of "KT", but they're basically the same thing).
Check out Brandon Walkin's excellent BWToolkit
NSViewController will work fine. I've used it for a very similar situation without any problems.
I’m writing a simple iCal-like app in Cocoa that I’d like to resemble the main view of iCal.
Does anyone know which GUI element (i.e. NSWhatever) was used to create the Month-view (this thing: http://skitch.com/edwardog/b38ba/ical)?
Thanks!
PS – A hint at figuring this sort of thing out for myself would also be well appreciated; I’ve got a feeling that the answer lies somewhere in .nib, but after poking around I didn’t have much luck.
CalendarWindow.nib, "Window".
Looks like it's all custom views I'm afraid.
The main calendar view must be a custom subclass of NSView, with custom drawing in the overridden drawRect: method.
If you really feel like poking around in running applications, check out F-Script Anywhere.
I'm not claiming that iCal uses it, but you might try NSDatePicker, which supports a calendar style.