The flock is muzzle-down, working hard on our newest application which will have its thin veil of secrecy lifted in the not-so-distant future. While fleshing out the interface look-and-feel of our new project we discovered the need for a few fairly common controls that, unfortunately, are not a part of the standard kit Apple provides for us with Cocoa and Interface Builder.
To remedy the situation we started our own custom Interface Builder palette in house, which we now present to you in the hopes you might find it as useful as we have in your coding endeavors. The HIG may be on its deathbed, but perhaps we can at least make it a little easier to synthesize the implicit HIG.
RSControls currently provides three new Cocoa controls.
RSGradientSquareButton and RSActionPopUpButton provide two new button types that allow you to emulate the buttons and pull-downs found in applications like Mail and NetNewsWire. The best part of course is support for Panther (10.3). Take that ‘Small Square Button’ type!
RSStepperButton is a NSButton subclass appropriate for using with an icon in a toolbar. RSStepperButton allows you to easily increment its value by a fixed amount with each press. We use it for rotate buttons in our toolbar, similar to Preview. Support for bindings and a custom Inspector for IB come free of charge. RSStepperButton may not be sexy, but its reliable.
We welcome comments, suggestions and large sacks of money.
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Thank you for RSActionPopUpButton! I had previously created this control by subclassing NSPopUpButton, but that wasn’t very elegant. Major tweaking was required to get it to behave properly, and it was never visually correct in Interface Builder Your solution is much better.
Fantastic work guys, this makes life so much easier. Apple should have added this about a year ago.
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[…] Well at WWDC, I asked around and got nada. Looks like I was on my own again. Which is sort of a shame, since this set of controls has been reinvented more times than the wheel or something like that. I should put together a little gallery of them. But now Rogue Sheep comes to the rescue with their RSControls. […]