Designing inspector palettes
Designing inspector palettes
- Subject: Designing inspector palettes
- From: Ken Tabb <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 26 Oct 2001 18:12:18 +0100
Hi,
I've got an app which could make good use of an inspector palette feature
(like the 'Info' one in IB). It too could have a popup at the top of the
inspector window, letting you select which information (in IB's case:
Attributes, Size, Connections...) to show in the rest of the inspector
window.
[1] I don't have the first idea of how to go about this. I'm guessing
that the popup is actually showing/hiding different subviews in the
palette... i.e. the Size pane is a separate view from the Connections
pane. Is this right?
[2] How do you get all the documents to use the same inspector window?
I'm guessing an NSWindowController and/or NSDocumentController is key in
making sure there's only 1 palette, accessed by each of its documents?
[3] What's the best way of getting the document to refresh the
inspector's contents with its own info (eg. if you just clicked from one
document to another, so the info in the inspector is for the wrong
object)? I'm guessing that when the window becomes foremost, you refresh
the data, but is this the job of the NSWindow, the NSDocument, the
NSWindowController, or the NSDocumentController?
I couldn't find anything of particular relevance to this in
/Developer/Examples, but if you think I've missed something please point
me in the right direction!
Thanks for your help,
Ken
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Ken Tabb
Mac & UNIX Propellerhead & Network Bloke (Health & Human Sciences)
Computer Vision / Neural Network researcher (Computer Science)
University of Hertfordshire
http://www.health.herts.ac.uk/ken/
Certified non-Microsoft Solution Provider