Re: Pop-Up Tabs and the Quest for a File Viewer
Re: Pop-Up Tabs and the Quest for a File Viewer
- Subject: Re: Pop-Up Tabs and the Quest for a File Viewer
- From: David Adamson <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 7 Aug 2001 08:49:26 -0400
Ah. I must reply to the list, too.
On Monday, August 6, 2001, at 03:41 AM, Brendan Younger wrote:
I have indeed come with my white sword of justice and truth
brandished, ready to fight the UI guidelines to their bloody death
but come only to find an elusive, non-existent entity. In short,
I really don't know precisely what you're looking for, but here's
my best guess and explanation.
A file browser NSView? Well, which one? NSOutlineView and
NSBrowser come to mind as worthy candidates, but you could also do
some weird icon view a la the OS 9 Finder. Either way though, and
this is the beauty of it all, you can keep your back-end logic for
the file system completely separate from the UI. The back-end
stuff isn't too hard, but there are some classes in MiscKit which
can give you plenty of ideas (MiscFile). Also, there are a few
Apple examples which simply use the file system for a data source.
As for the dock thing, I believe that it is not possible. Perhaps
you could ask someone at Apple for it?
I was thinking more along the lines of a complete entity, premade,
a fully encapsulated viewy-thing, so one could have a file browser
built into any window in any application, a sort of portable
Finder. I realize now that this is a rather silly thing to expect
to be available off the shelf, being of limited use in most
applications beyond the context of open/save dialogs, where there's
already something provided. I asked both because I was feeling
lazy, and because I had mistakenly remembered something of the sort
from Swing, but this turns out to be JFileChooser, more akin to the
dialogs than to the beast in my mind.
And MiscKit has been checked out, and knowledge of things therein
will do me good.
And progress is being made, a simple outline view with data source
providing the basic functionality, easily incorporable into my
magic windows. A tab-less tab view was one suggestion for quickly
switching between view-modes, the other option, I suppose, being
the yanking-out of the old and instantiating of the new, each time.
But this will not be tried until I can get small icons to appear
next to the names in the outline, until I get my data source doing
everything I want it to. It's close, although I may take a peek at
Omni's. Omni is good.
So now to play more with IB, strange beastie that it is. It
frightens and confuses me, it does. No matter. I shall inflict the
same upon it.
One parting question -- NSOutlineView (through NSTableView) has an
extra, "doubleAction" for its target. As I'm trying to go more
along the IB path, is there an interface-o-matic* way to set this
second Action? It seems there's only room for a single
connecty-line...
Thanks,
-David.
*which brings up the point that "programmatic" is a very strange
word, implying the existence of such middle-words as programmate,
or programmar, the latter of which actually makes some sense. Upon
reflection, however, it seems the word came about in contrast to
"automatic," for thus it seems to be used. Although one wonders why
the perfectly acceptable and preexisting "manual" or "by hand" were
discarded for the suffixial monstrosity of "programmatically,"
unless perhaps the coiners were guided by some unconscious desire
to reflect the patchwork and bloated nature of so much of the
world's handwritten code.
This has been a lengthy asterisk.