I searched and thought about this a long time and couldn't find a satisfying answer:
I want to create an application with a NSView in which hundreds of elements are drawn which are still interactive and should react on dragging and hovering.
Now, it seems to me, that these elements should be NSViews, because the NSView can handle all these events, but at the same time if I draw hundreds of NSViews, I think it is a bit of an overuse as I have read here (Avoid the Overuse of Views).
For comprehension let's say I want to make something like the Finder Desktop with hundreds of documents and folders on it that react to drag and hover events.
What is the right approach to this?
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I'm trying to create a navigation system similar to the iOS 7 native app switcher - in that I have a set of images along the bottom and a set of views above them, which scroll together, but at different rates.
I understand from a little digging that I need to implement a parallax scrolling effect, but what would be the best way to handle this? Should I set up two UIScrollView instances wide enough for the correct number of images/views, then set the contentOffset on one when I scroll the other? Is there a better way to ensure they stay in sync?
Apologies that this is something of a vague question, but specifically I'd like to know if there is a preferred means of implementing parallax while keeping the content in the two portions in sync in terms of both hitting the centre of the display at the same time, etc.
Are there known and proven ways to manage memory with scrolling components like tables or grids other than recycling cells as is used in Cocoa? The sequence of calculations and datasource/delegation calls needed to make this way of laying out views works but also makes coordinating complex animations with the cells and a scroll view error prone as you have to pay careful attention to the sequence of calls as it reloads data, scrolls to an offset and other mechanisms of the layout that affect the target frame of your animations. I am looking for a more declarative approach to providing content to the scroll view and having it figure out a smart way to manage it's memory as is done by a browser when you load the DOM with a long vertical layout of pictures.
I found it easier to create my own custom layout classes that only do layout on my views and not to impose an elaborate protocol such as NSTableViewDataSource and the like that makes animation difficult to program. I like to know exactly where my views are at all times, the complete hierarchy of each view and I don't like to keep a model in sync with my views so I store data on the views themselves. In my mind the objects on screen are the one and only objects I like to orchestrate as a programmer. I want direct declarative control over them kind of like a game programer. By subclassing a scroll view directly and following very simple layout rules outside of the normal layoutSubviews methods of Cocoa to avoid surprise layouts, I was able to control my animations better and do more complex and fluid animations. Hope this inspires someone to do the same.
I just wanted to know how you could implement a bookcase, like in iBooks, into your iPhone app.
I presume you would need to use a UIScrollView, but then I read somewhere that you need to use a UITableView. Which is it?!
You'd use code that others have already written, such as AQGridView.
I'm not sure if there's a better way, but you could create multiple small views or images (these would represent each book) then add these small views/images to the subview of a larger view in a linear format (leaving a space between each element). Then just set the background of your larger view as an image of a bookcase. Sorry I don't know of a better way.
And for the above solution I would use a UIScrollView.
You can implement it anyway you like, but it seems to me that a UITableView would be the easiest (which will scroll anyway). All of the magic will happen in your UITableViewDataSource, which is where you will decide what books are placed on what row.
Once you have decided which books to display you will have create a custom tableview cell that draws the appropriate objects.
To be honest, while not too difficult of a task, it will take a lot of effort to get looking right. If you are not comfortable with custom drawing then be prepared to spend time learning about the various image/graphic APIs.
I've been trying to get this right for weeks now, and though I've learned a lot through my misfires, at this point, I just need a solution. The issue is with unpacking the seemingly overlapping graphics and UI APIs included in Cocoa, many of which produce similar effects, but feature unique limitations that I've often discovered only after investing many hours into an implementation.
I'm new to Cocoa, but not to programming, and I'm trying to create a Mac app with a very customized UI – think Capo, Garageband, or Billings. One view in my window will display an ordered list of subviews, each of which does a lot of custom drawing, and each must support a "selected" state and drag-reordering. The subviews do not need to support being dragged outside of their superview.
Ideally, a drag will give animated feedback as it happens, pushing neighboring sibling views to make space, e.g. toolbar icons or the Safari bookmarks bar. The trouble is, I can't seem to land on the right pack of technologies to get this right. I've done the subviews as NSView subclasses in an NSCollectionView and also as CALayers in a custom CollectionView-like NSView, and neither seems to offer the perfect solution. That said, the first option seems the better of the two for its superior handling of mouse events.
I've not yet tried doing this as a TableView, and I don't want to go down that path without some indication I'm on the right track. Extensive Googling has shown only that there aren't any up-to-date resources on CoreAnimation-enabled reordering or dragging. As such a standard feature of the OS X UI, I feel like this should be easier!
Any help from anyone on what the right tools are for this job would be greatly appreciated. TIA.
Background: I recently got two monitors and want a way to move the focused window to the other screen and vice versa. I've achieved this by using the Accessibility API. (Specifically, I get an AXUIElementRef that holds the AXUIElement associated with the focused window, then I set the NSAccessibilityPositionAttribute value to move the window.
I have this working almost exactly the way I want it to, except I want to animate the movement of windows. I thought that if I could get the NSWindow somehow, I could get its layer and use CoreAnimation to animate the window movement.
Unfortunately, I found out that this isn't possible. (Correct me I'm wrong though -- if there's a way to do it this way it'd be great!) So I'm asking you all for help. How should I go about animating the movement of the focused window, if I have access to the AXUIElementRef?
-R
--EDIT
I was able to get a crude animation going by creating a while loop and moving the position of the window by a small amount each time to make a successful animation. However, the results are pretty sub-par. As you can guess, it takes a lot of unnecessary processing power, and is still very choppy. There must be a better way.
The best possible way I can imagine would be to perform some hacky property comparison between the AXUIElement info values for the window and the info returned from the CGWindow api. Once you're able to ascertain what windows in the CGWindow API match AXUIElementRefs, you could grab bitmaps of the current window contents, overlay the screen with your own custom animation draw of the faux windows, then as you drop the overlay set the real AXUIElementRef's to the desired-end-animation positions.
Hacky, tho.