Thursday, November 13, 2008

KTUIKit - Layout Managers for Cocoa

Cathy Shive has released a framework called KTUIKit that provides better view controllers, easy ways to set view background colors and borders, and a basic layout manager class. I think NSView’s spring and strut system is the weakest part of Cocoa. It works fine in simple cases, but when you have multiple panes in a window or you need to resize a window through a wide range of sizes, it falls apart. KTLayoutManager looks like a good start at solving this problem, although ultimately I think it should be addressed in Cocoa itself.

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I couldn't agree more, more bug reports!!

A non-mouse cowherd

I couldn't disagree more!

Layout managers only result in crappy UIs.. this is one of the biggest strengths Cocoa has over Java.

A non-mouse cowherd: I suppose you think layout managers should be removed from Core Animation, then? As to NSView, should Cocoa developers: (a) avoid layouts that require resizing, or (b) write lots of tedious, error-prone code to manage said resizing?

@ A non-mouse cowherd: Layout managers can be very helpful. They free up the developer from having to think about exact pixel placement.

Layout Managers are important.
Even Apples Software has I18N bugs. Sometimes german texts (which are statistically 30%) larger then english is truncated.

Thats only one example.

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