Boy is there a renaissance among the Mac developer community in terms of interface design. We’ve really got it going now, with every almost every app deciding to recreate their controls. I posted yesterday about the iLifeControls Frameowork by Sean O’Brien, and a few days ago about smoking windows. Again, this post is NSWindow-related.

All the way from the land of Bithaus, Ganyard brings us “Stylish Windows“. This isn’t as feature-packed as the iLifeControls, but is a little more flexible with it’s coloring and size of the top and bottom bars. Personally, I don’t really think I would find a use for this, but some of you may find this helpful.

Also from the same author, comes a reflecting NSImageView (hence the title of this post). It seems a lot of code for something that would take thirty seconds in Photoshop, but this would be really handy for dynamically generated images. Really. Check it out.

And I promise, I will post something programming and coding related soon. My eyes are sore from all this eye candy.

With all the fuss over Disco and it’s smoke effect, Jonathan Wight decided to take a deeper look. The result of his labor - anyone can integrate smoking windows into their apps. Stick around and let me show you how.

If you’re like me, one of the first things you do when you see a cool app is dig straight into the resources folder. Well, right-clicking on Disco.app and hitting “Show package contents” is pretty revealing. Charge straight into the Contents folder, and you’ll see a nice little folder bearing the name “Frameworks”. Need I say any more? Just like all you need for Core Graphics is contained within my Core Graphics Framework, so the smoking windows code is contained in this little folder. It’s a simple matter of doing a class-dump to build some headers (or if you got in early, the headers are already there), and you have access to all the smoke you need. So, are you interested? Download the Disco beta and drag it to your applications folder. Then, you may proceed to grab a copy of my (modified) version of the smoking windows project and play around with it at your leisure! I quote from Toxic Software:

If your hardware is capable enough you should be able to see the smoke effect rising from the top of the window. (It might take 10 to 20 seconds for the smoke to appear). You can change the smoke parameters by using the smoke settings window (dialog? pane? view?) within Disco. Then just copy Disco’s prefs (com.discoapp.Disco.plist) to SecondHandSmoke’s prefs (com.example.SecondHandSmoke.plist).

Obviously, this way of setting preferences isn’t very flash, so you can just set the specific preference keys from within your code, and it’ll still run fine. Don’t expect that done from me, though, I’ve got a lot of work to catch up on. Then again, if someone wants to make their window smoke and can’t get their head around the preferences, I can always take a little break and help you out.

Second Hand Smoke

Have fun, and try not to get addicted to smoking.

Update: This smoke no longer works with the version 1.0 release of Disco. Updated smoking instructions here.

Liberate your application

Now works on all architectures, and without hiccups!

Can’t get enough of window transitions? Love a little eye candy? Well, you’re in luck. The Core Graphics Framework and Xcode Project Template make adding the fantastic Core Graphics function to your app a breeze. In fact, it’s even more complete than the tutorial, and already has more features in it before you write a single line of code! It doesn’t stop there, however. This framework powerful enough to use the genie effect. That’s right. That awesome Mac OS X transform you can get when you minimize an application. Core Graphics contains a wealth of resources. You really have to check it out.

Continue Reading The ultimate Core Graphics resource