macOS Programming Mac's Dock like with Cocoa

[satyam90]

Hi, I am using Cocoa framework with Obj C.
For my application, I want to have Mac's Dock like bar with some icons in that. Infact a tool bar which is transparent like dock, which has zoom effect similar to dock. Can some body have examples of such programming. Please share with me.

 

[three]

You are coding a application that basically has a dock in it?

 

[satyam90]

Yes, I want to have dock like control in my application.

 

[satyam90]

Is it possible to make an icon in toolbar big when mouse is placed on it? It might provide zooming effect that is there in dock.

 

[kainjow]

You're going to need to do this in a custom view and draw the images yourself. I don't think any built-in control would be sufficient, although NSMatrix would work if you didn't handle the zoom effect.

 

[lucasgladding]

You're going to need to do this in a custom view and draw the images yourself. I don't think any built-in control would be sufficient, although NSMatrix would work if you didn't handle the zoom effect.

Seconded. Personally I would use a custom view with NSImageView subviews. Track the mouse movements inside the main view and calculate the mouse X position as a percentage of the width of the view. You could then scale the NSImageViews based on their distance from the current mouse location. If you adjust the frames using a Core Animation animator, that will get you the soft animation you want. I wouldn't adjust the frames with every mouse movement, just after a certain number of pixels or percentage of the view width. That tolerance could also be calculated as the view width divided by the number of NSImageViews.

Best of luck

Luke