Overview

The heart of a graphical user interface is its graphics its views, windows, images, and the other visual elements that appear on your computer s display. This chapter examines how to handle those elements in Mac OS X.

The sections of this chapter focus on:

• Views the basic graphical elements of the interface

• Windows the containers of views, images, text, and other graphical elements

• Images JPEG, TIFF, or other images that are displayed in the interface (but are not part of its interactivity)

• Toolbars one of the most attractive features of the Aqua interface

• Drawers an ooh feature of Aqua that demonstrates that windows need not be rectangular

Note that controls buttons, sliders, pop-up menus, and the like are dealt with in Chapter 21.

Looking at Views

In the C++ frameworks of MacApp and PowerPlant, views are a generalized class that descends from an event handler class. Windows are a specialized type of view.

In Cocoa, views and windows are descendants of a similar type of object NSResponder. However, windows and views are equal descendants of NSResponder: Windows are not descendants of views.

It should scarcely be surprising that an enormous amount of work has gone into handling the windows in graphical user interfaces. After all, they are the interface for most users. A number of different strategies have been used to display them and to manage their interactions. In Cocoa, you will find a class of window controllers that manage windows. If your application has multiple windows, it will normally have multiple window controllers.