On Nov 22, 2009, at 2:06 AM, Richard wrote: > as part of an application i am working on, i have made a chat client in the > style of ichat with pics and bubbles and such. i am currently doing this > using an NSTableView
This works, but you'll find it difficult to handle multi-line messages. NSTableView can have variable row heights these days, but whenever the view width changes you'd have to scan every message counting the number of line breaks and set the row's height accordingly. > now, i would like to be able to select and copy sections of the text > displayed in each chat bubble, but i am unable to work out how to do this. i > would also like to be able to make text links clickable. i understand that > NSTextView has both these capabilities, but am i correct in thinking that > you cannot have an NSView in an NSCell? That's basically correct. The reason is that the cell doesn't have a specific position in the view; it's used to draw every single row; but a view has to have a single position. There are some workarounds for this but they involve adding a subview for every row, which doesn't scale well. The way iChat worked originally was to use a single NSTextView for the whole chat, with a paragraph per message, and draw a custom background that looked up the layout bounds of each paragraph to find the bounding box of its balloon. This sounds simple, but the details got very messy, and I don't recommend it. These days the best way is to use a WebView and a custom CSS stylesheet. Make each message a <div> element with a particular class, and the stylesheet describes the background and border. WebKit supports some nonstandard CSS border attributes that make it easy to draw the border by tiling a single image. You use the DOM API to insert a <div> when there's a new message. —Jens _______________________________________________ Cocoa-dev mailing list (Cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com) Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list. Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to arch...@mail-archive.com
