Greetings,
I'm about to undertake an almost complete rewrite of my user
interface. I've made the decision to drop support for OS X 10.4,
which will allow me to (finally) use Core Animation and Grand
Central extensively.
Now I'm faced with how to engineer the many table, outline,
browser, and matrix views I have. I have some elements of the
views that are animated, and I'll want to do more. I'll
especially want to animate items (i.e. rows) as single
entities—–sliding the row up or down, zooming it in or out, etc.
My table views are fairly complex. Not draw not just the content
of individual cells, but also background graphics (that draws
shaded regions around groups of objects) and overlay graphics
(that draw lines between connected/related objects).
Right now, I'm using the "trick" of having the table or browser
cell create persistent NSView subviews that preform the
drawing+animation for selected cells. The rest are simply drawn
using traditional NSCell objects.
Now I want to migrate to Core Animation, but I know that child
CALayers and NSViews don't mix. That is, an NSView will either
host CALayer objects or NSView subviews, but not both. This
makes working CALayers into NSTableView and NSOutlineView
somewhat problematic. For example, I can't just use CALayers to
draw background or highlights if some of the cells are creating
NSViews to display content in the same view.
So what's the best way to construct complex table, outline, and
browser views that support CA layers?
So far I've imagined two ways of approaching this:
(1) Keep with the traditional table/outline/browser view + table
cell logic, creating NSView subviews objects which then host
their own CALayers to provide animation.
(2) Display all table data using CALayers. Instead of drawing
anything, each cell invocation would spontaneously create a
CALayer for each cell in the table. Background and overlay
graphics would be provide by other CALayers.
I'm sure the first will work, but it feels clunky.
The second approach has a lot of appeal, but I worry that
NSTableView or NSBrowser might create hidden/secret NSView
subviews that will mess everything up.
I'm sure some of you have been down this road, and I value your advice.
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