How do you vertically centering an image on an NSButton - objective-c

I'm build a Mac application in the style of the Lion Mail.app. As part of this I'm attempting to create a simular toolbar to the one in the Mail.app but I can't seem to get the image in my toolbar button centered vertically.
Looking at the Mail.app toolbar I see a nice series of buttons with centered icons:
but when I go interface builder I can't seem to recreate the same button. What I get is:
What I've tried doing is, in Interface Builder:
Create a new window
Add a NSToolbar to that window
Add an NSButton to the toolbar with Style - 'Push', Image - 'Envelope', Position - 'NSImageOnly', Scaling - 'Proportionally Down'
As you can see the icon is clearly not centered vertically on the button like those in the Mail.app toolbar.
Anybody have any ideas???
At the moment I'm using XCode 4.2 and laying out this button with Interface Builder. I'm trying to build the toolbar button by ONLY adding the image to the button and not painting the button for each item, ie drawing the border and icon.
Any help would be greatly appreciated as this has been driving me a little nuts.
Thanks in advance - AYAL

Turns out the answer to this problem was much simpler then I had expected. After a lot of teeth gnashing, hair pulling, and twiddling pixels I came across the solution.
Instead of using a 'Push' button I simply had to switch to a 'Round Textured' button. Once I did that any image I added to the button was nicely centered. Next I just had to manually scale my image to look right.
The recipe then for a Mail.app Toolbar is as follows:
Add a button to your Toolbar
Set the button style to 'Rounded Textured'
Set the image of the button
Set the position to 'NSImageOnly'
Set the button size to 40 x 25 as well as the min and max sizes of the ToolbarItem
The result is a toolbar that can look very simular to the Mail.app toolbar.
Thanks All - AYAL

One way to do it is to have your image actually be the button i.e. take up all of the button's canvas. You will have to use the button's setBordered: method so the button's border is not drawn.

you could make the button image in something like gimp or photoshop then use that as the background or image for the button.
i feel like your going to say "this is what im doing". and maybe you made the little mail icon but i mean for you to make the whole button, outline and everything, then use that for the button image. make sense?
like here, just use this as the background

Related

Yosemite Toolbar Style

How do I get the new toolbar item style of OSX Yosemite?
I created a standard toolbar, but the buttons don't have that button-like look. Do I need to drag actual buttons to the toolbar to get this look?
What I have:
What I want (that round bezel and white background):
There are two types of items in toolbars, image items and view items. It looks like you have an image item. You seem to want a view item where the view is an NSButton configured as a round textured button. So, yes, you should drag actual buttons to the toolbar.
I would not attempt to control the button background. You should use the button as-is to get the default system appearance. Apple recommends using a PDF template image (all black with the alpha channel used to make the image). The button itself would not have a title/label. Rather that would be on the containing toolbar item.
It looks like you may have applied an internal blue "glow" or highlight to your image. Generally, you should not do that. Let the frameworks apply appropriate effects to the template image automatically based on the button state and shows-state-by mode.
Toolbars in the Human Interface Guidelines
Controls which are appropriate to use in the window frame (including the toolbar)
Designing images for toolbar buttons
Works just fine for my Cocoa app under Yosemite -
are you actually setting the template property for your icon images..?
From the NSImage docs:
The 'template' property is metadata that allows clients to be smarter
about image processing. An image should be marked as a template if it
is basic glpyh-like black and white art that is intended to be
processed into derived images for use on screen.

how to align text center in nsMenuItem Cocoa Mac osx

I am new in MAC OS X development, I have to align text centre in nsMenuItem but I not find any particular solution. I checked on google but not find any tutorial.
Find some tutorial but not exactly same, in these tutorial we take a NSView in nsMenuItem and then Insert subview in NSVIEW to accomplish it centre align.
Is there is any better solution? Please provide me link if possible.
Edit : I attached screen shot, but this is not working for me.
Thanks
You can set the Attributed String of the menu item, which does allow you to center the text, as well as change the font, color and size of the text as well.
I do not know which version of Xcode/OSX you are using, but under Xcode 5.0.2 you can use the built-in interface builder to edit the attributed strings of menu items.
Click the MainMenu.xib entry, then click the menu you want to edit to open it, then click the menu entry. On the right side of the window there should be some options, if not click the right most square in the group of 3 at the top right of the Xcode window 1.
Once you have the right panel open click the Attributes Inspector icon [2] (4th from the left, looks like a slider type icon). At the bottom of the list of attributes you will see an entry for "Attrib. Title" [3].
That is where you can set a custom font, color and alignment for your menu item.
If you need more control then that provides, you can also embed custom NSViews into your menus which gives you complete control over how the menu will look.

Xcode Interface Builder set highlighted image for button

I'm making an cocoa application from Mac OS X, not for iphone.
I am able to set the background image of a button and uncheck bordered in the attribute inspector. However, I do not know how I set the image for when you click on it (highlighted/on click, whatever you want to call it). I want to do this because
I have found guides on google to do this with UIbutton but this isn't helpful since I'm making this for Mac.
I am using InAppStoreWindow and the button is in the Title bar. When I click on the button with the custom image, the background goes white:
Thank you very much!
You are getting white background when button is clicked because You're using incorrect type. You need to change button's type to Momentary Change. You can change it in Attributes inspector:
Or change programatically:
[buttonOutlet setButtonType:NSMomentaryChangeButton];
And for highlighting: just add another image as alternate image in Attributes Inspector and it will be shown when button pressed.

Thick title bar window in cocoa, similar to iTunes

I've been looking around and I can't find much information on how I would go about creating a window similar to the Mac App Store or iTunes. It has a thicker title bar with buttons ect. as you can see in the image below.
Any help would be much appreciated.
In Interface Builder there's an item called "Toolbar". Drag that onto your Window, then you can add "Image Toolbar Items", "Flexible Space Toolbar Item", etc.
There are some similar questions to this one: Title Bar Buttons and Custom Title Bars.
I think the main workaround is to create your own view to be placed in top of the titlebar as a child of your window's content superview.

adding an invisible button to the background in IB

I'm working with Xcode doing a Ipad app.
i simply want user to click anywhere on screen (not counting text fields) to perform some IBAction.I'm using an invisible button that covers my whole view.
Since I have some text fields in my view,i need to add this invisible button to the background of my user interface. I cant seem to find this option in the button attributes? any help?
Just set the button's type to custom.
Did you try setting the opacity of the button to zero?
I guess i got your point. You just want to put the UIButton(invisible) on the back of all the UITextField. The simple solution to this is open the Document Window in the IB. Now expand the view tree in the list view. Just drag your UIButton above the UITextFields and set the alpha value for the button in the property to be zero.
Hope this helps!!
iPad users don't "click". They "tap" or "touch".
In Interface Builder, I believe views are constructed with a z-index from top to bottom as they appear in the document window, so dragging your button so that it appears as the first subview of your main view should be a quick fix for this.
Have you considered other approaches? This doesn't sound like standard behaviour for an app and will probably cause havoc with anybody using Voice Over. What are you trying to accomplish?