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gwelmarten

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jan 17, 2011
476
0
England!
Trying to make an interface that takes a few inputs from a user over a few screens. Like the setup for Dropbox (see attachment). Can anybody tell me how to do this, or what the interface unit is called?
 

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Trying to make an interface that takes a few inputs from a user over a few screens. Like the setup for Dropbox (see attachment). Can anybody tell me how to do this, or what the interface unit is called?

Looks like standard Cocoa/Aqua to me. Play around with Interface Builder in Xcode.
 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wizard_(software)
A software wizard or setup assistant is a user interface type that presents a user with a sequence of dialog boxes that lead the user through a series of well-defined steps. ...​

Its typical name notwithstanding, there's no magic to making them. When I've made them before I used a single window and loaded the sub-views from nib files. The subviews were made the usual way: by hand in IB. The logic was all coded in Objective-C.

AFAIK, Apple has never called them "wizards", only "assistants". Maybe there's some sample code available on the web. Cocoa wizard and Cocoa assistant are the obvious search terms.


If you're looking for a way to simplify making, maintaining, or managing the subviews, maybe there's a higher-level tool oriented towards website developers that uses HTML + JavaScript. If you find that, you could embed a Webview in the window and load the HTML + JS content locally. That approach might be more sensible if you expect to make a lot of assistants. For a typical program, I expect that crafting the HTML + JS underpinnings in order to use a hypothetical web-based wizard-maker may well be more work than just making the subviews with IB.
 
I feel like I've seen a developer tool when digging around the Apple Dev Tools that generates the interface for installer apps like that for you... It's why almost every installer follows the same steps and looks almost identical. I want to say its called "Package Maker" or something like that... I think I found it in the same folder as "Icon Maker" - except I think Apple has since done away with that tool in favor of just having several app icons with special names the same way as they do for iOS...
 
I feel like I've seen a developer tool when digging around the Apple Dev Tools that generates the interface for installer apps like that for you... It's why almost every installer follows the same steps and looks almost identical. I want to say its called "Package Maker" or something like that... I think I found it in the same folder as "Icon Maker" - except I think Apple has since done away with that tool in favor of just having several app icons with special names the same way as they do for iOS...

Yes, that's the tool for making Installer packages. However, it's limited to only making Installer packages. It's not a generalized tool that lets you make arbitrary Assistant sequences.
 
Yes, that's the tool for making Installer packages. However, it's limited to only making Installer packages. It's not a generalized tool that lets you make arbitrary Assistant sequences.

Sorry, I only glanced at the thumbnail of the OP's screenshot and thought it was specifically of an installer, not a generic assistant.
 
NSPanel in an .xib file. The editable and static text fields are NSTextFields. Create a new window - New->File->Window and drag the NSTextFields into it.

you also need to create a subclass of NSWindowController to manage it.
 
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