Learning by doing

I do not know, how often I used this tiny little sentence. Innumerable times and I oftend tend to say: “Just shut the fuck up and stop getting on my nerves!”

Anyway, this is my way of learning something and so I just started off with “Kraxelmax”. Yeah, I know, I never was and still am really creative in naming my applications. Just suggest another and I might pick it. Sure, you will be mentioned in the credits :).

So, what did I do so far?

Basically just trying things out in order to get familiar with the Interface Builder.
By time I will provide an explanation on how to do certain things, but be aware hardcore-programming-nerds since they will certainly raise your hackles, but hey, it will be easy to understand :)

Starting with sheets

Sheets are simple windows that cover a specific window, avoiding the user does things, he is not supposed to, until the dialog is dismissed.

This was really easy to set up, after figuring out, the sheet has to be a window, not a panel. Stupid me.

Shortened: You place a button on each window and connect them with the open/close method of the sheetController.

Add two instance variable declarations to your header file.

IBOutlet id mainWindow;
IBOutlet id clientSheet;

Open your controller and type in following code for the open-method:

- (IBAction)openSheet:(id)sender
{
    [NSApp beginSheet:clientSheet
                      modalForWindow:mainWindow
                      modalDelegate:self
                      didEndSelector:NULL
                      contextInfo:nil];
}

beginSheet takes the sheet (clientSheet) as an argument and attaches it to the main window.

The modalForWindow puts mainWindow into modal mode, which means, the user can not interact (click, close, etc) with our main window.

didEndSelector and conextInfo are not relevant at the moment.

Next: the close-method:

- (IBAction)closeSheet:(id)sender
{
    [clientSheet orderOut:nil];
    [NSApp endSheet:clientSheet];
}

This is pretty self-explanatory. Tell the clientSheet to orderOut (go away!) and end the sheet.

Easy, huh?

External links

• Working with sheets
• dev.Floriansweb (german)