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So far in my use of objective c and cocoa, I have made some simple OSX apps that make use of some of the basic apple UI elements such as NSButton, NSTextFeild, NSView, etc. However, now I find that I'm wanting to add parts to my programs that don't fit so squarely within the given UI elements. ie. in a program I'm writing now, I want to create a checklist in which users can enter new elements, check off elements to delete them, etc. all with a custom UI. My problem right now is that I don't even know where to start looking for the information I need to learn how to create more advanced things like this, or what to search for to start finding information. Could anyone set me on the right track as to what information I should be looking for and where I can go to find it? Thanks.

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It's not entirely clear what this would look like, but you can get a long way down the road by subclassing and customizing the Cocoa UI classes. If it looks basically like a button and acts like a button, chances are you can get the custom look you're after by adjusting the frame, images, and text. A list of checkboxes sounds a lot like a table view with checkboxes in the table cell views, not something that requires a completely custom UI element –  jxpx777 Mar 27 '13 at 15:43
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closed as not a real question by Monolo, jrturton, rmaddy, Josh Caswell, Joshua Nozzi Mar 27 '13 at 16:50


1 Answer

up vote -1 down vote accepted

You'll probably want to look at Cocos2d or even OpenGL. I'm guessing though that this may be overkill for your solution. You might also be able to override or extend some of the base UI elements.

If you're new to Objective-C and Mac OS programming, I would recommend taking it a bit slower with this. Often we developers dream up huge complex interfaces when really, just a basic, stock interface would work just fine for our users.

For your first release, keep it simple and just ship some code in short time. Then work with your users and see how they really want to work with your app and go from there.

Good luck!


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Those are useful for making games, but if you're just making regular controls with non-standard appearances, you can do that with much less work and much better behavior by subclassing the standard controls. –  Peter Hosey Mar 28 '13 at 5:42
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