How to make 'filter' child panels?
How to make 'filter' child panels?
- Subject: How to make 'filter' child panels?
- From: Cem Karan <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 22 Jan 2007 09:22:59 -0500
Hi all, I'm looking for advice/confirmation for what I plan on doing
in a little helper app that I want to write for a co-worker of mine.
I'll try to make what I say make sense ;-)
I have a co-worker that has a lot of data that is all image related,
and he is getting swamped by the amount of data that is associated
with it all. The data is broken up into layers, but there are
literally about 40 layers so far, with a heck of a lot more planned
out. Trying to display all of them, or even a portion of them would
be insane. Being an enterprising idiot, I suggested that I could
hack together a small program to help him out (the idiot part is that
I'm a C programmer and a mac USER; I'm learning Cocoa as I go). The
first thing I realized is that with child windows and transparency, I
could actually make all the windows I need, and make all the
uninteresting ones invisible. Yes, it would use a fair amount of
memory, but by drawing only those portions that are visible (if such
a word can be used for an invisible window), I would have the ability
to instantly turn on any layer he wanted. I even found the perfect
code for it; Matt Gemmell's HUDwindow (http://mattgemmell.com/files/
source/hudwindow.tgz) code.
Except... that's not quite what he needs...
The problem is that he may need information from layer 1 in the upper-
right corner of the image, and layer 3 in the lower right, and layer
5 all over. The layers are complicated enough that using colors to
hint at the different layers won't work to well (especially if he
decides to use the big display and view, say 27 layers at the same
time).
So I came up with a slightly modified idea for a child window. Add a
NSScrollView to a panel that is a child of the main window. When the
child window is moved, programmatically scroll the view so that the
final effect looks like a magic filter that displays whatever is in
the child's associated layer. Different filters could be resized,
overlapped, etc, without causing any problems. Or so I think.
The real questions are the following:
1) Has this been done already in some neat manner that I can use?
2) If it hasn't been done, is this a reasonable approach to take?
3) Aside from memory (which isn't a problem, we can throw more
hardware at it), are there any other gotchas to consider?
I don't have any experience to speak of with Cocoa (I have a 1st
edition copy of Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X, but have only done
about 1/2 of it, and lots of not-even-half-finished projects)
Thanks for any hints or help,
Cem Karan
_______________________________________________
Cocoa-dev mailing list (email@hidden)
Do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list.
Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com
Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription:
This email sent to email@hidden