Analyzing Twitter for Mac: how this awesome interface

Question

Lauren Brichter did a wonderful job with Twitter for Mac and created a new standard user interface. I am trying to understand how this was done in order to be able to use some of these functions in my applications: - Title buttons and title buttons, how to get something like this? - Animations, how to share this view? - Table view, this is good, but is it an NSTableView?

...

Thanks in advance for the tips and tricks.

Answer 1

From what I was told, Lauren wrote his own NSView replacement based on top of CoreAnimation. He basically rewrote UIKit for the desktop. This allowed him to do all the fancy transitions, etc., not being held back by the outdated NSView code.

Answer 2

I'm not sure about the great interface, but I was looking a bit for myself ...

The usual title bar is actually hidden, I think, and if you find Twitter.app, show the contents of the package and look in the / Resources folder where user images close, minimize, and enlarge the image.

You can use something like BWToolkit to create a custom black header with its gradient view.

To hide the standard title bar: [window setStyleMask:3]; (if window is an IBOutlet associated with your window). For title buttons, simply use NSButtons with an image of about 12 x 14 pixels and in the inspector in the interface builder, clear the "Bordered" check box for the buttons.

To make the window more "fancy", you can make it fade out and have only a little transparency: [[window animator] setAlphaValue:0.9];

Attenuation: NSTimeInterval delay = [[NSAnimationContext currentContext] duration] + 0.1; [window performSelector:@selector(orderOut:) withObject:nil afterDelay:delay]; [[window animator] setAlphaValue:0.0]; NSTimeInterval delay = [[NSAnimationContext currentContext] duration] + 0.1; [window performSelector:@selector(orderOut:) withObject:nil afterDelay:delay]; [[window animator] setAlphaValue:0.0];

Answer 3

If you are still working on this ...

Twitter has opened a library of user interfaces based on their work on Twitter for Mac called TwUI earlier this month:

http://engineering.twitter.com/2011/07/starting-today-twitter-is-offering-twui.html