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Controls

Figure 15-87 Acceptable, but not recommended, usage of a pop-up menu to switch among panes

Tab View Implementation

Tab views are available in Interface Builder. To create one using Application Kit programming interfaces, use the NSTabView class.

Grouping Controls

This section describes controls that visually group other controls in a window. When there is more than one logical collection of controls and information in a window, the use of grouping controls helps users distinguish between them.

There are two types of grouping controls in Mac OS X: separators and group boxes. For help in deciding whether to use a group box or a separator, and for examples of layouts with them, see “Grouping Controls in a Window” (page 349).

Important: The controls described in this section are suitable for use in the window body; they should not be used in the window-frame areas. See “Window-Frame Controls” (page 249) for controls designed specifically for use in the toolbar and bottom-bar areas in your window.

Separators

A separator is a thin vertical or horizontal line. Separators have a lightweight appearance that’s good for separating controls into categories or subgroups of related functionality. For example, the Appearance preferences pane (shown in Figure 15-88) provides controls that determine a wide range of high-level

2008-06-09 | © 1992, 2001-2003, 2008 Apple Inc. All Rights Reserved.

C H A P T E R 1 5

Controls

appearance characteristics, such as highlight color and the placement of scroll arrows. Although each control affects some aspect of the Mac OS X appearance, the window uses separators to create four subgroups of related controls.

Figure 15-88 Separators divide controls into subgroups or categories

Horizontal separators

Separator Usage

Use a separator to divide a window body into distinct visual parts. You can place separators either vertically or horizontally, depending on the overall layout of your window.

Note: The separator control is not used in a toolbar; the vertical separator you can see in a toolbar is an NSToolbarSeparatorItem object (which is available in Interface Builder).

In general, you should avoid stretching a separator to span the entire width or height of a window; a separator that spans a window can give the appearance of slicing a window into unrelated rows or columns. If the categories of content in your window are completely unrelated, and it might be confusing to see all categories simultaneously, it might be better to display each category in a pane of a tab view instead (see “Tab Views” (page 329) for more information about using a tab view).

Separator Labeling

A label can accompany a separator, but it is not required. A separator label should have title-style capitalization (see “Capitalization of Interface Element Labels and Text” (page 131) for information on this style).

The separator line should be at the base of the text of the label. Figure 15-62 (page 308) shows how this looks.

2008-06-09 | © 1992, 2001-2003, 2008 Apple Inc. All Rights Reserved.