Question

Please keep in mind that I’m a really newbie Cocoa developer

Scenario: I’ve a search the when reaches the end of document restarts from begin, a so called “wrap around”.

When I do the wrap I want to show a window that flashes on screen for some time (one second??) like and OSD (On Screen Display) control window, TextWrangler and XCode do that when text search restarts from the begin.

How can I implement a similar window?

Answer 1

Implementing a view to do this would be relatively simple. The following code in an NSView subclass would display a partially transparent rounded rect which ignores events when placed in a window.

- (void)drawRect:(NSRect)dirtyRect {
    [[NSColor colorWithDeviceWhite:0 alpha:.7] set];
    [[NSBezierPath bezierPathWithRoundedRect:self.bounds xRadius:10 yRadius:10] fill];
    //Additional drawing
}
- (NSView *)hitTest:(NSPoint)aPoint {
    return nil;
}
- (BOOL)acceptsFirstResponder {
    return NO;
}
- (BOOL)isOpaque {
    return NO;
}

If you do want to do this in a window, you will need to create a borderless, non-opaque window and set this as the content view. Also, you will need to have the view fill it’s bounds with a clear color at the start of the drawRect: method.

//Create and display window
NSPanel *panel = [[NSPanel alloc] initWithFrame:NSMakeRect(0,0,300,200) styleMask:NSBorderlessWindowMask|NSNonactivatingPanelMask backing:NSBackingStoreBuffered defer:YES];
[panel setOpaque:NO];
MyViewSubview *view = [MyViewSubview new];
[panel setContentView:view];
[view release];
[p setLevel:NSScreenSaverWindowLevel];
[p orderFront:nil];

//Add these two lines to the beginning of the drawRect: method
[[NSColor clearColor set];
NSRectFill(self.bounds);

However, this window will intercept events and I have not been able to disable this using standard methods.

To fade the view, check out NSViewAnimation, or use an NSTimer object and do it manually.