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Re: Appearance Drawing Questions

On Friday, May 30, 2003, at 01:36 PM, Eric Schlegel wrote:

On Friday, May 30, 2003, at 11:48 AM, Duane Murphy wrote:

There is this great Aqua UI designed and presented by Apple.
There are several controls designed and presented by Apple.
There is an API that lets you build your own controls from scratch.
But you cant draw them to look like Aqua.

The intention is that you use the Appearance Manager API to draw your own controls, as much as possible. If you use Appearance, you'll get the right look.

I don't know that Appearance Manager can really get 'close enough' to the sort of Subclassing I think Duane and others (myself) would really like to be able to do (perhaps this should be a future HIView feature ? 8-)

For example I'd like to have a scrollbar control that's a combination of standard aqua control and the scrollbar used in Final Cut Pro's Timeline (i.e. a scrollbar with additional controls at each end of the thumb which can be dragged to zoom the view).

Looking at the Appearance Manager API's I can see functions for drawing the arrows at each end of a scrollbar and a function for obtaining the track rectangle, and also obtaining other configuration parameters regarding thumb size etc. However there are no calls to actually draw the track area with the correct shading, nor any calls to draw the thumb indicator in the correct style (let alone a 'part' of the thumb).

I'd hope that some hypothetical future HIView subclassing feature would provide me with mechanisms to define my own parts in the scrollbar control (two extra pieces on the thumb), virtual methods I can override for drawing the scrollbar pieces (arrows; track beginning, middle, end; and thumb beginning, middle, end). That way I can concentrate on the finer details of interaction with this control (what happens in the view being zoomed).

Right now I'm faced with some serious photoshop time to draw what I want to look 'good' and a lot of 'redundant' drawing code (arrows and track) to come up with a scrollbar that looks OK but still won't 'fit' with the Aqua look and even if I spent a lot of extra time getting the hues and shading right I'll still be stymied if Apple revises the Aqua look sometime in the future.


If the Appearance API doesn't provide what you need, and you need some other sort of control, then we'd really like it if you filed bugs describing what you need so we can try to provide it.

I'm not sure that things are missing from Appearance Manager per se, more that there should be a different way to do this.


-eric

Andrew 8-)
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 >Re: Appearance Drawing Questions (From: Eric Schlegel <email@hidden>)



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