I am reworded the above question.
Let's say I am using 20 toolbox buttons and or labels or whatever on a VB window app form, and I have changed the default colors, size, and so on. Is there a way to view in code or design view all the properties and values that have been changed for any one tool (object) in a pop-up window.
In other words instead of having to go to properties and scroll, I push a hot key and magic! In one small pop-up window, I can see the changes for btnone, or lblTwo and or even better, make changes on the fly or go back to default values, or change to new values. Like an Xray format tool in brackets, or google.
Related
I have a ComboBox with thousands of items bound to it.
The problem I'm facing is when I run the app on a tablet the scrollviewer's scrollbar is very thin hence I cannot hold and drag it and can only swipe to move inside the ComboBox.
Hence I was wondering is there a way to change the style template of the ScrollViewer inside the ComboBox inorder to make the ScrollBar width larger.
You'll have to dig in to the style template and change some hard set properties for Width / Height that sit on the parts like the Thumb that you will find on the default style template. You can extract a copy via selecting a Scrollbar -> Right Click -> Edit Style -> Edit a copy. Save the copy wherever you need it, like a resource dictionary if you plan to use it multiple places or to the instance where you need it.
(Note: Generally folks start at the ScrollViewer level, then find a Scrollbar in it, and apply the style changes there so they can apply the style directly to ScrollViewers)
Once you have your changes made to the control template you then need to pass them to your ComboBox. If you only need it for the one ComboBox, You can just put the style template in it's Resources and remove the x:Key name you gave it so it hits the instance of the TargetType via inheritance for just that ComboBox.
However if you want it to hit EVERY ComboBox, then you'll need to edit the ComboBox style template and add a reference to the Style template you just made to it's embedded ScrollViewer.
You'll find long tutorials out there for stuff like WPF/Silverlight that pretty much the same concept but little nuance differences in the templates and syntax of properties.
Hope this helps, give it a shot and if you get stuck come on back and we'll get you sorted.
This question already has an answer here:
NSTableView with +/- buttons like in System Preferences using only Interface Builder
(1 answer)
Closed 7 years ago.
I'm building an OSX app and want to create a set of controls similar to what's found at bottom of the standard Network Preferences configuration panel. I'm running into some layout problems that I wouldn't have expected.
These are my specific questions:
What contains the 3 buttons so there's similar shading all they way across the row where the buttons are positioned? In particular, what's causing the area without buttons to have shading?
How do you do this without getting a double border where the row of buttons meets up with the table?
I want to do this with an xib file. This may be incredibly simple, but I'm missing something I guess.
I find that if you make a button with style "Gradient" and type "Momentary Change", then it looks like the other buttons but does not respond to clicks, so you can use that as the area after the last button. (The NSMomentaryChangeButton is documented as changing the image and title when clicked, so if you don't use an image or title, nothing should change.)
If you check Refuses First Responder in the attributes inspector, then it will not be possible to highlight this blank button using Full Keyboard Access.
Ken Thomases also brings up the issue of the blank button being shown as a button to Accessibility. One can fix that by using a subclass of NSButtonCell that has just one method:
- (BOOL)accessibilityIsIgnored
{
return YES;
}
I think that's easier than writing a custom view.
As d00dle says, avoid double borders by slightly overlapping things.
Since you want the slack space to have the same background as the buttons, and since the buttons can change appearance from release to release of the OS, the best thing to do is to get the frameworks to draw it like it would the buttons.
Rather than using an actual button as JWWalker suggests, I have used a custom view that leverages NSButtonCell to draw the background. The advantage is that you can be sure there's no chance of getting undesirable behavior. For example, a button could get focus (for users who have All Controls selected in System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts > Full Keyboard Access) so that the user could Tab to it. Accessibility will report the presence of the button through VoiceOver. Etc.
Configure the button cell just like the buttons (set buttonType and bezelStyle). In the view's -drawRect: call [buttonCell drawWithFrame:rect inView:self];, where rect is similar to the frames of the buttons. Since one way to avoid double borders is to make the buttons larger than the view's bounds, you may need to do the same for rect. For example, you might want to use NSInsetRect(self.bounds, -1, -1).
The buttons are buttons... This can be accomplished with a custom view drawing border and the background "shading".
To avoid the double border where the table and the custom view meet you simply align it so they overlap by 1 point (pixel) or avoid drawing the top border in your custom view.
I don't know of any standard object capable of doing this.
Wondering if someone could help me....
I have a small .NET application where I have an Edit button on a main form. When the user clicks the Edit button, I want to popup a small form right next to it (on top of the main form) with a speech balloon tail attached on the side of the form pointing to the Edit button. So it gives the effect of a floating form pushed out from the Edit button.
I don't want the appearance of a normal speech bubble, I want it to look like an actual borderless form (with square corners). It could be a custom control or anything (however, I am not yet familiar with creating my own custom controls), but I need to add Text Controls, Pictures, Label Controls, etc. to this floating form.
Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks
UPDATE
I am trying to create something to this affect:
So imagine the ? being the Edit button and the other being a form with custom controls.
Like this?
To get this behavior:
Select an image which will represent your speech bubble. Put a PictureBox on the form, make it use this image. Place two labels, as above, adjust the font.
Pick your transparency key (color). Your image background and form background need to be set to that. I used black for demo purposes, which is a bad choice if you plan to have any black or text in your speech bubble. Set form's TransparencyKey property to this color in designer. More about TransparencyKey on MSDN.
(final step, not shown on the screenshot). Set FormBorderStyle = None.
Also make sure you have other ways to close your bubble, because X will be unavailable.
The final result may look something like the following:
Note: You may notice some drawing artifacts, most images on the internet have smooth borders, and transparency key does not support shades, has to be exact color. If you are fine with these minor artifacts, feel free to leave it at that. Or, edit it to get rough borders. Or find another one that better suits your needs.
I'm trying to implement a sort of drag functionality into my app. As a simplistic example imagine I have a 2x2 square of buttons, so four buttons total. Clicking a button will perform some other functionality however I want when they hold and drag one of these buttons for it to do something else (ideally if you drag one button and drop it while in the space of another button the two buttons will swap places, as long as I can get dragging and dropping working the swap should be easy).
I've done some research and followed a few tutorials but seemed to get errors at one step or another with all of those. It seems ListViews and GridViews have some drag and drop functionality in them already , but I had trouble properly arranging my buttons (there are many more than four and they are in very specific positions, like a diagram) inside these views, let alone getting drag and drop working with them.
How would I go about doing this? Ideally I could just tag these buttons as draggable, and then on a drag-drop event check for a drop position, then if the position is valid perform a swap method. I just can't seem to figure out how to make them draggable or how to have an event that checks a drop position.
Thanks.
Easy peasy, create a custom control that looks the way you want it to, set ManipulationMode to TranslateX|TranslateY, handle manipulation delta events to update positioning with something like a Canvas or TranslateTransform and when manipulation completes - either make it click or animate to the new position. From my experience - getting any other manipulations to work with a regular Button class just isn't working and since a button is a really simple control - it is easier to create your own than try to extend the existing one in such cases.
I have seen that in Cocoa I can create a custom view using drawing primitives which allows me to draw what I like but at a very low level.
Instead I'd like to create custom widgets using a combination of existing controls. For example:
I'd like to create a table with images and combobox in cells
I'd like to create a custom widget wich is a combination of several (for example a list, a button and combobox)
How can I approach this problem ?
Secondly a typical cocoa developer uses external controls? Is there a repository or a list of interesting external custom controls (commercial or free) ?
I'd like to create a table with images and combobox in cells
There already exists NSImageCell and NSComboBoxCell. Are you sure you need to do anything different?
If the problem is that you want an image and a combo box in the same cell, you will have to subclass NSCell. Currently table views can only contain cells, not views, which makes your life harder (as understanding how cell drawing works is more difficult). That will change in Lion, however, so if you can wait until then, this will become easier!
I'd like to create a custom widget wich is a combination of several (for example a list, a button and combobox)
How is your custom widget different to just placing those three things in the same view?
You could write your own NSView subclass. When it's created, it should create a list, a button and a combobox and add them as subviews to itself. Your NSView subclass should handle the logic of keeping them in sync or doing whatever it is you want them to do. Then, to use this combination control in Interface Builder, you place a Custom View and set its class (rightmost tab of the inspector) to your NSView subclass.
BTW, on a tangent, are you sure you mean combobox? Loads of people coming from Windows get this one wrong. A combobox is a combination of a menu and a text field: it allows the user to enter custom text that is not in the menu. If you just want a dropdown menu of choices (and the user can't enter a custom one), you use an NSPopupButton.
Secondly a typical cocoa developer uses external controls?
Yes, sometimes. Things like BWToolkit can be very useful. There's a lot more that are just floating around mailing lists as code snippets, rather than being cleaned up and put in a library. Search for what you need to do!