For Hire: BSD implementation of Yojimbo-like title bar

I’m quite fond of the title bar Yojimbo uses for its notes pane and would like to emulate it in a project of mine. Implementing the view myself however has been very frustrating. I’m still a very novice Cocoa drawing programmer and when it comes to enhancing the draw methods of standard controls I find myself surrounded by questions and unfamiliarity. I’d like to throw some money at the problem and am looking to hire a UI designer to develop the view to my specification.

Yojimbo Note Title

QuickTime Demo

The view I want basically works like this:

  • Has a gradient background.
  • Uses a NSTextField for the title. When not firstResponder it shows the string with a transparent background and no borders; when being editing it shows a raised editor with a grey outline and soft shadow to make the editor appear popped out. The editor should grow while been edited. When the title is blank it should show the placeholder in grey so during the editing the growing text area isn’t zero.
  • Under the title it will use a small NSTokenFied to show tags. (NSTokenField is a subclass of NSTextField so if you can get the shadow/growing design working there this should be the same).
  • I will have controls on the left and right so these fields should work as placed in IB. Don’t assume the NSTextField will fill 100% width or anything.

Other notes:

  • The code will be released under BSD license.
  • When trying to implement the view myself I came across a session of WWDC 2003 where they demoed an Address Book like UI and called it Raised Editor. It has some interesting approaches to the issue (drawing the shadow as an image, cutting out the middle and compositing it over the editor area) but because he only demos some of the code (and the full sample code it no longer available from Apple) I’m left to wonder how I could apply the techniques they used inside of an NSTextView for shadows around my NSTextField. The key issues is the bounds of the control and drawing a shadow outside its bounds.
  • There are some code examples on CocoaDev and CocoaBuilder that are relevant to the problem but for me they weren’t a full solution. (IE: I Want to use NSTextField to get spelling checking, etc. I don’t want to subclass NSView).

If you are interestined in the job, please shoot me an email with a price quote. If you want to show off your mad cocoa skills and do it for kicks, that’s welcome too. Thanks alot.

Posted on: May 30, 2007 – 5:55 pm

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