Re: NSScrollView and general IB annoyance
Re: NSScrollView and general IB annoyance
- Subject: Re: NSScrollView and general IB annoyance
- From: Vince DeMarco <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 1 Oct 2001 08:47:45 -0700
On Sunday, September 30, 2001, at 11:45 am, Brian Hook wrote:
At 10:57 AM 9/30/01 -0700, Vince DeMarco wrote:
Okay what would a good tool tip be on the info panel settings.
Lets take the window attributes info panel??
I can add this in but i'm not sure what to put in as a tool tip for the
settings.
First, let me say that I'm very happy you've asked =)
There are really two separate issues. The first is just putting tool
tips over the Cocoa Views palette in IB, e.g. a help balloon that says
"NSOpenGLView" or "NSTextView".
The second issue is that when someone is messing with the attributes, it
would be nice if they could understand intuitively what the various
attributes mean. Most are self-explanatory, and I'm sure ALL are
self-explanatory if you're a Cocoa/NextStep veteran, but for those trying
to transition to Cocoa it can be very daunting trying to cross index each
view's methods with the appropriate check box or pull-down in the Info
attributes window. To jump back and forth between IB and Explorer (and I
still can't find the search functionality that existed in PB/10.0) to
figure out what "Retained backing" or "one-shot" means can really mess up
your workflow. Having help balloons or context sensitive help would be a
huge help here for us neophytes.
What would be GREAT is if there was a button you could click that would
just automatically take you to the view's description in the help system.
At least this way you could easily try to sort out what each attribute
is by reading the view's description. This would be a huge leap forward.
Seriously, take a look at Microsoft Visual Studio's integrated help
system. That's how things should be. Highlight a word, hit F1, and bam,
it brings up the function/class description with links to related
procedures and a piece of sample code on how to use it.
We are actually already planning on doing that. We are just waiting for
some API to make this happen. But the idea is you will get access to the
documentation from PB.
And please, please put an NSScrollView in the Views palette.
This I disagree with because a scroll view is only really useful if its
scrolling something. It would be useless to put a scroll view in the
palette without a corresponding documentView contained in it.
The difficultly in learning Interface Builder is that you really need to
understand Cocoa to make heads or tails of it.
vince