General design for a Mac app, document based versus?

1
votes

I am learning cocoa, and I am creating an application that will require similiar layout to the screenshot below (this seems like a very common layout approach).

What kind of controls/architecture would this type of Cocoa application be?

I'm still in my early stages of learning/reading, and I know of document based applications only so far, but this type of layout doesn't seem to look like a document based app since it doesn't really require multiple windows opened.

If it isn't document, is there a name for other design patters or layouts?

From what I now so far, I would describe this like:

I would be grateful if someone could give me a detailed overview of the high level design for an app like this i.e. things like: # of panels, views used, controls, controllers etc?

Also, a few quick sub-questions:

  1. what kind of menu controls are those in the left pane, then expand and display sub elements?

  2. When preferences windows are displayed, what is that effect called that makes it display in an animated way (like the address book does), where it is a small window that expands to its correct size in an animated fashion.

enter image description here

2
objective-cxcodecocoa

2 Answers

2
votes

You are right that this is probably not a document based application, as they open documents in new windows by default.

To layout the window like that, there’d be an NSSplitView that contains the 3 panes. Each pane may optionally contain a view loaded from an NSViewController, which can help keep the code modularised, but it depends on what you’re trying to do if this is appropriate.

The left pane would be an NSOutlineView (a NSTableView subclass), the middle an NSTableView, but I’m not sure exactly how the right-hand side view would be created (lots of custom NSViews and other things, possibly WebView)

That popover options window is possibly a NSPopover (which contains an NSViewController), but that’s only compatible with OS X 10.7, so may also be totally custom for backwards compatibility and easier customisation.

Also note this is a fairly complicated example you’ve given, with lots of custom controls that are probably harder to create than they look:

  • To get the outline views on the left to have unread counts and icons (from memory) is not built into AppKit, so was all custom created. To do things like that, you’ll need a solid understanding of NSCell vs NSView, and ideally also know about Core Animation layer backed views, and what to use for different aspects.

  • The window has a taller-than usual title bar. This means the developer probably had to do some crazy stuff to get it to work, if not create the whole window from scratch.

That’s just the start. There’s lots of really nice design in there that’s custom and done from scratch.

Designing Mac apps can be hard sometimes. AppKit is pretty old (back from the NEXT days), and has lots of legacy stuck in it. UIKit on iOS on the other hand is quite nice – Apple clearly learned from their past and made things much better.

I’ve hardly touched on the controllers and model behind all that. There’s lots of different ways you could do it. For persistence, you could use CoreData, sqlite, NSKeyedArchived, just to name a few. Brent Simmons (past developer of another RSS reader, NetNewsWire) wrote some interesting blog posts about that: http://inessential.com/2010/02/26/on_switching_away_from_core_data http://inessential.com/2011/09/22/core_data_revisited

The way you design your model & controllers really depends on the specific problem. Cocoa really forces you to stick to MVC though – if you don’t, things are guaranteed to end up messy.

I hope that all helps! I’m really only just learning myself too.

0
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Apple refers to this type of application design as Single-window, library- (or “shoebox”) style and gives a number of recommendations for this design choice in the docs.

(see Mac App Programming Guide)