Red Hat Diaries/0056

Textured Windows Revisited

As reported previously, the Developer CD for Jaguar has a new twist in Interface Builder: with a single checkbox click one is able to transform any window with a 'brushed steel' look. I immediately attacked S3 The SpamStopper-Stopper, displaying the results here.

I then suspected that, based on the '.app' architecture of NextStep apps, any NIB-based Cocoa application could be 'made over' in much the same way. Some standard Jaguar apps need a bit of work to make their new appearance completely integrated, but the results are still immediate and astounding.

As an example, TextEdit sports its own Find panel, and it is quickly transformed to appear as above. The only hitch here is that the checkbox on the right ('Find Options / Ignore Case') is for some strange reason set to paint with an opaque background. Other Cocoa controls may have the same option, and have it turned on; in such case you need to check the option off.

The result is, for thirty seconds' work, awesome. On the next page you can see the TextEdit preferences panel transformed in the same way.

Click here »