Cocoa Programming for OS X: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide

Creating Views Programmatically

You will usually create your views in Interface Builder, but occasionally you will need to create views programmatically. If, for example, you have a pointer to a window and want to put a button on it, this code would create a button and put it on the window’s content view:

let superview = window.contentView
let frame = NSRect(x: 10, y: 10, width: 200, height: 100)
let button = NSButton(frame: frame)
button.title = "Click me!"
superview.addSubview(button)

Some of the Cocoa view classes are capable of a surprising variety of appearances. For example, you have no doubt seen that there are a lot of buttons in the object library. But there is only one NSButton class. All of the different button appearances ...