Fill NSView with NSColor

Scripting Forums AppleScriptObjC and Xcode
#1

Hi,

Seems like this should be straight-forward, but alas, I’m having no luck. I am trying to fill a NSView with a NSColor using something like following:


set aColor to current application's NSColor's selectedMenuItemColor()

current application's NSColor's setFill_(aColor) -- this doesn't work

set aRect to customView's |frame|()
tell current application to NSRectFill(aRect)

Is this a syntax issue or am I going about this in the wrong way? Thanks in advance!

#2

Hi,

simplest solution: enable CoreAnimation Layer in Interface Builder and


set aColor to current application's NSColor's selectedMenuItemColor()
customView's setBackgroundColor:aColor
#3

This worked great. Thanks Stefan!

On an somewhat-related note, while this did successfully fill my NSView with the “Blue” highlight color as I had defined in System Preferences>General>Appearance, when I changed the preference to “Graphite” and re-ran my application, the NSView filled with a the blue color again. I checked in a color picker window (Developer Palette) and selectedMenuItemColor has been changed to the Graphite color there.

Any ideas why selectedMenuItemColor would still be ‘referencing’ the blue color?

#4

Update:

I couldn’t ever figure out why selectedMenuItemColor would only return the Blue color, so I tried to implement something like the following, but get no highlighting whatsoever from:


-- statusItem is a NSStatusItem and is implemented using:
--set statusItem to current application's NSStatusBar's systemStatusBar()'s statusItemWithLength_(current application's NSVariableStatusItemLength)

-- statusView is a custom NSView and is implemented using:
-- statusItem's setView_(statusView)

statusItem's drawStatusBarBackgroundInRect_withHighlight_((statusView's |frame|()), true) -- also tried |bounds|()
statusItem's drawStatusBarBackgroundInRect_withHighlight_((statusItem's  view()'s |frame|()), true) -- also tried |bounds|()

The end goal here is to highlight a NSStatusItem app, and respect the user’s color choice preferences. Thanks in advance

#5

drawStatusBarBackgroundInRect is normally used in the drawRect method of an NSView subclass.

But then you have to implement the code to manage the highlight and menu open behavior by yourself

#6

Hi Stefan,

Thanks for the information. I had been using the following tutorial as an aid in trying to accomplish the highlighting:
http://undefinedvalue.com/2009/07/07/adding-custom-view-nsstatusitem

NSStatusItem doesn’t seem to directly have a bounds property, but rather its view does. I assumed using the bounds/frame of the view would be sufficient for drawStatusBarBackgroundInRect, but of course this isn’t working. Is there a need to draw a ‘new’ NSRect? Is that what drawRect is accomplishing? I’ve read in other forums that one should not attempt to call drawRect directly, but rather call setNeedsDisplay. I of course had no luck trying this.

I thought maybe part of the issue was that getting the bounds/frame of statusView wasn’t returning the screen position origins (0,0 was returned) in addition to height and width values, but modifying the script to get the origins didn’t solve anything:


        set aRect to statusItem's valueForKey_("window")
        set aRect to aRect's |frame|() 
        statusItem's drawStatusBarBackgroundInRect_withHighlight_(aRect, true)

The Apple documentation doesn’t seem to indicate that anything special needs to happen to get this to execute correctly,