Fake NSWindow with a NSView inside a NSMenuItem - objective-c

Before I start I should say I know this seems like a long shot, however I figured it was worth a try.
One app I am working on right now is a Mac Statusbar App. It has a NSStatusItem in the menubar and when clicked it will display a custom window with a popover appearance (like on iPad or like Fantastical has on the mac.) Anyway I started testing this by inserting a single nsmenu item in the status items menu. The view has set clear color for the background color on its window. However this still doesn't quite work as you can see in the pic below
There is still a small white thin line above and below the item
The clear area isn't clear, its like it has a blur filter on it
Other than that, it works fantastically great. I just didn't know if anybody else has ever attempted anything like this before and figured out how to overcome these 2 issues which seem to be the only thing preventing this from working.
If there is no way to do this I may have to resort to using a custom view for the NSStatusItem so I can get the coordinates on screen to position my own window below the NSStatusItem.

A fake window seems like a rather weird approach to this. Why not just pop up a regular window? I suggest MAAttachedWindow: http://mattgemmell.com/2007/10/03/maattachedwindow-nswindow-subclass

Related

get black screen when opening UITabViewController

My app opens to a UITabViewController. It has 3 UIViewControllers a,b,c as the tabs, connected by a Segue.
It used to work fine but something happened and now when I run my program, the tabs are displayed and it seems that the controller is working (with NSLogs the viewDidLoad of the first tab seems to run) but except for the tabs the whole screen is black and nothing is displayed.
It seems that this happens a lot, but I've tried all the suggestions and so far nothing has worked.
Looking for possible advice on how to deal with this, thanks!
try to change the view's backgroundcolor of each viewcontroller.
Are you selected starting point in storyboard like this
enter image description here
This is one major reason for black screen.
Second one background image, third one background view colour.

Creating semi-transparent, round cornered with border Window in Cocoa?

What would be the best approach for creating a Window that is semi-transparent, has round corners and an outline around its border and the arrow, but without the the title bar and buttons.
The window will pop up from the Menu Bar when a use clicks on the menu bar icon.
I'm looking to have an effect similar to the "Applications" and "Downloads" windows:
I guess I will need to do the drawing myself. But I'm wondering what's the best way to do this and whether there is anything already built into Cocoa that can minimize the effort? Or maybe a 3rd party project that has already done that (couldn't find anything exactly like that)?
Thanks.
You can create your window with
- (id)initWithContentRect:(NSRect)contentRect styleMask:(NSUInteger)windowStyle backing:(NSBackingStoreType)bufferingType defer:(BOOL)deferCreation
with a style-mask of NSBorderlessWindowMask which will give an unadorned window. Its how the Dock does its mechanics too.
Note that you must init with this style , you can't change an already init'ed windows style.
Place a custom NSView via the contentView accessor with your desired background custom drawing at the top of the windows view stack.
You might need also to setOpaque to NO
What you are looking for has been done a lot. Too much really.
The classes you want to look into are as follows.
NSStatusItem
This is something that appears in the status bar section of the menu bar to the right side.
NSMenu
If you want this from a menu in the application menus, you'll need to do some clever things with views in menus.
NSWindow
As the other poster notes a borderless window is one way to achieve this.
NSPopover
This is another way. Combined with the above, a fancy technique is to use a clear window called a cover window then, when clicking on the menu or status menu, invoke a popover from a point below that in the clear cover window.
That should be enough to get you started with what you should look into.
Beyond that, peruse the Mac App Store and also look at cocoacontrols.com and GitHub.

Full screen app with NSToolbar

This is hard for me to explain, so please bear with me for a minute.
In Xcode, if it is in full screen mode, showing the app's menu also moves the toolbar down. I have tried to make an NSView move and resize whenever the menu bar is shown, but I cannot figure out how to do it. I think this has something to do with and event, because setting struts and springs in Xcode does not make it move automatically. Can anybody help me figure out what the event is?
Edit: I just re-thought my question, and I have to make a correction. NSToolbar does this on it's own. I want a normal NSView to move and resize itself when the window goes into full screen mode.
I think you might be having the same issue as I was - if so, you need to call [NSToolbar setFullScreenAccessoryView:] on the "accessory view" you want to glue to the bottom of the NSToolbar.
Note that in windowed mode, your accessory view should take up space in the NSWindow's contentView just like any other view, but when you enter fullscreen mode you'll want to remove the accessory view somehow since Cocoa rips it out of your layout and leaves a gap unless you account for that.
I can certainly understand this issue being difficult to explain without having the background knowledge - I had the same problem. :)
Also see: How can I get a two-row toolbar like in Mail.app and Xcode?

Best way to create floating notification iOS

I've got a tabbed iPad application with just about each tab running a UIWebView. I'm getting all sorts of callbacks, like when a user tries to leave the corporate site (which only displays the company site to users). In this case, I pop up a "toast" style window that tells them to click a button to open the page in Safari. I also pop it up with a spinner and no text to indicate that a page is loading. The approximate look that I'm going for is used in lots of applications, but you can see it best when changing the volume on the iPhone or iPad. It's just a translucent rounded square that fades in and out.
Right now I've got it implemented on one of my tabs, and I did it by creating the objects (a spinner, a label, and a UIImage with the square) and then programmatically hiding and showing them using [UIView beginAnimations] and changing the label's text. It works perfectly but I've got these nagging things hovering over my interface in Xcode, and it takes a lot of setup to accomplish if I wanted it to be in another tab, which I do. I can't help but think that there's a better way to accomplish this. I thought about making and adding a subview, but that would leave a white background to the toast. What I'm thinking is creating some sort of object that I can allocate in a tab's view controller whenever it's needed.
What are your guys ideas, or have you done this in the past? I see it in a lot of prominent applications, like Reeder, so I'm sure it's been done more eloquently than I have done it.
Matt Gallagher has a great class called LoadingView here Showing message over iPhone Keyboard. I use it.
MBProgressHUD is a popular library for this, as well.

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?