[Nitride]

I am working on porting some Carbon controls over to Cocoa and just wanted to let people know about them. They are currently *mostly* function e.g. you can add them to an app's nib and they work and should retain settings in the nib.

Some features are *not* working such as Cocoa-based image file for 'icons' and the drop-down menu variants.

They look like other Apple-only controls in various Apple software, but are fully dynamic and available to any Cocoa (or Carbon) app on Mac OS X 10.2 and up. They are not pre-made graphics so they all scale in height and length, can have their text dynamically altered or localized and can use your own icons.

Just remember they are not finished yet, they will get better as I finish them and they may cause crashes/hangs/write things to the Console.

Flat Button: http://www.exittoshell.com/products/...on/index.shtml

Flat Button looks like the small square controls in the Mail drawer and Font panel in Mac OS X 10.3. A lot of apps are using similar controls (image-based usually) now. This is a real control.

Membrane Button: http://www.exittoshell.com/products/...ne/index.shtml

These buttons look a lot like real "membrane" type buttons and some of the buttons in Garageband.

The Cocoa versions are labeled as such. Make sure you read the Read Me before attempting to use them - you must follow a certain procedure to get them to work in Interface Builder and a Cocoa app.

[Diggory Laycock]

Nice work - they look very interesting.

[Nitride]

Originally posted by Diggory Laycock:
Nice work - they look very interesting.

Thank you. I am making these because Apple has introduced various "Apple only" controls in various apps that complement existing Aqua widgets, and are available to as many environments and OS versions as possible. The Cocoa versions will look and work exactly the same as their Carbon cousins.

I am not implying that everyone make their software look exactly like Apple software. These controls are not pixel-perfect copies. They do look similar to a casual observer so that there is visual continuity between say Mail and an independent Cocoa or Carbon app. They were created also to reduce the effort required to develop new software by providing ready-made controls that are fully dynamic and full featured and reusable. This is my niche I guess.

Eventually all of my controls will be ported to Cocoa. Part of the process is building a "custom control" codebase for Cocoa as I made for Carbon. The difference between the two Cocoa controls now available is simple a handful of drawing routines (one main and several supporting functions), which are almost verbatim as used in the Carbon versions (text drawing is the only significant difference).

[smeger]

Do these look okay when the user has a theme applied to their OS? I ask because I've been working on a framework that developers can use to get color data directly from the OS, but it's not quit ready for prime-time. Sounds like something you might want to use when it's done.

[Nitride]

Currently the controls appearance is "fixed" to whatever you see in sample windows.

Membrane controls do support different color schemes set by the developer (in Carbon anyway).

I am aware that Theme are very popular, but I believe that the overwhelming majority of end users aren't using themes. Many themes do not fully alter the UI either. I am not wanting to get into a debate for/against themes anyway.

However I am thinking of how to draw these using System-provided theme color/texture info, which is how alt Themes work anyway - they simply supply different color or texture data to the OS. In many cases the controls I am creating, to replicate Apple controls, are image-based or completely proprietary and thus are not really theme-savvy anyway.

So the short answer is these are not theme-savvy controls, not because I can't make them theme-compatible, but because that is not my focus at this point.

My focus is to get controls out that work in Cocoa and Carbon and are fully dynamic and support the basic features of OS X e.g. Accessibility, event models, UI scripting etc.

[Nitride]

Progress is being made, and is being tracked in the ETS Commons forums for each item listed above.

I just don't feel like cross-posting to two totally separate forums for this stuff.

Maybe by the end of the week I will have pretty much usable controls in all respects. Thank you for your interest in my work (donations/publicity humbly accepted).

[Nitride]

Both the "Flat Button" and "Membrane Button" Cocoa controls are in Beta now.

They are both largely functional, they just need fine tuning/tweaking/bug fixing. I don't think I will make any substantial changes to their functionality while in Beta (like some do) so whatever they do now is what the 1.0 will do, only better.

After these are cleaned up I still have a few other Carbon controls to bring over to Cocoa including a dial aka circular slider control, a text-only control similar to Safari bookmark items in the browser window and a color bar control similar to the headers in iTunes' sidebar.

Thanks in advance for trying these out.