Skip to Content
Cocoa® Programming for Mac OS® X For Dummies®
book

Cocoa® Programming for Mac OS® X For Dummies®

by Erick Tejkowski
February 2009
Beginner content levelBeginner
408 pages
7h 53m
English
For Dummies
Content preview from Cocoa® Programming for Mac OS® X For Dummies®

Chapter 12. Graphics

In This Chapter

  • Defining colors

  • Creating a custom view

  • Drawing rectangles and ovals

  • Painting irregular shapes

  • Creating text

  • Displaying images

From the beautiful fonts in a word processor to the shiny Finder interface, the Mac OS has always prided itself on fantastic looking graphics. Mac OS X is no different. With its sophisticated Quartz graphics engine, Mac OS X can produce stunning graphics. Cocoa gives you direct access to these powerful features of Mac OS X.

This chapter covers the basics of working with graphics in Cocoa. You create a custom view for displaying your graphics and draw on it with a variety of colors, shapes, and images. You even write code to change the opacity of your graphics, giving them the coveted see-through look.

Cocoa and the Art of Graphics

Before jumping head first into graphics, you need to familiarize yourself with a few important Cocoa data types: NSPoint, NSRect, NSSize, and NSColor. You need them to do any type of graphics programming in Cocoa, so they make a good starting point.

Points

Just like in geometry, Cocoa uses points to designate positions on a square grid. To work with points in Cocoa, you use an NSPoint structure. NSPoint is a structure comprised of two floats (x and y, respectively). Quartz, the graphics engine on the Mac OS, defines the bottom-left corner of a view as the origin (0,0). The x value increases as you move to the right. The y value increases as you advance up.

Note

The bottom-left origin is different than what ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Start your free trial

You might also like

Cocoa Programming for OS X: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide

Cocoa Programming for OS X: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide

Aaron Hillegass, Adam Preble, Nate Chandler
Learning Cocoa with Objective-C, 2nd Edition

Learning Cocoa with Objective-C, 2nd Edition

Apple Computer Inc, James Duncan Davidson
Learning Cocoa with Objective-C, 4th Edition

Learning Cocoa with Objective-C, 4th Edition

Paris Buttfield-Addison, Jonathon Manning, Tim Nugent

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9780470432891Purchase book