I think maybe the problem I see in the Cocoa API is that there isn’t really a consistancy in how view objects are configurable in terms of their visual properties. Sometimes you can do it in IB, sometimes you have to subclass and do the drawing yourself, sometimes you have to implement a delegate for the object and hand over the information that way and sometimes you have to do some combination of all three…it’s kind of awkward.

IB would be the most intuitive place to do this. It would be great for there to be some sort of style protocol that all view and view-like (Cells, Layers) objects would conform to so that IB could configure at least the most basic style properties…again thinking out loud.

I will condense these thoughts and submit them as you’ve suggested.

Also, Core Animation layers have a “style” property which allows you to feed in all of the display attributes you describe (fill, stroke, shadow, size, and so on) as a dictionary.

I fully support the idea of figuring out how common needs can be made easier — that’s the whole point of Cocoa. The important thing for all of this, though, is to condense it into into a description of how specifically you’d like the API/markup to work, then submit it as a bug report. That stuff gets read by real people. Markup is one option, but I think Interface Builder is probably even better. This is what it was designed for.

Also, use the mailing lists. The official Cocoa-dev mailing list is archived and easilly searchable at this site:

http://www.cocoabuilder.com/archive/bydate

Seriously, anytime you have a problem, search for it on the site and you’ll find that someone has asked your question already and someone else has answered it and often with some example code. This site was invaluable to me as a beginner and I still use it every day.

Scott:
I don’t mean control over every pixel, but over the stroke, fill colors and position, width and height of every visible rectangle in the window, the same control you have over a div tag in html. I think that this is what alot of people are going to expect when they come to Cocoa for the first time, especially the many that will come with experience in web design.

We can’t give everyone what they want, of course, but a lot of people struggle with these issues even now. So I sometimes wonder - how could this be easier?

I can imagine the view heirarchy + layer hierachy of a window being represented in mark-up, and then being able to apply a style sheet to that. For the controls, it’s a matter of asking - how configurable are they and how easy are they to subclass if the standard configuration options don’t meet people’s needs? I pick on the table view because it’s the worst offender and it’s the one people are always trying to customize.

I know I’m over-simplifying the problem but sometimes there’s no other way to start looking at it. And I really don’t know if CSS + markup is a good model to follow for destop apps. I’m really just thinking out loud : )

Peter:
Yeahh…that was sooo Jeff Atwood of me ; ) hahaha. Thanks a lot of your encouragement, it really does mean a lot.

BTW, C++ is not a strict superset of C—there are some differences. Objective-C is a strict superset of C, so those same differences exist between C++ and Obj-C. You would do well to read the New Testament or Practical C Programming in order to get used to plain C, before you dive into Objective-C.

Cathy: A year or so ago, I observed that one’s blog has matured when its author can refer to previous posts from new ones. I’d first noticed this in Coding Horror, and made that observation when I noticed that I was doing it, too.

Your blog has matured really fast. Good job, and thank you, and please keep it up. ☺

I understand the appeal of visual customization, and it’s hard to deny the value. But there are two main factors for new API:

1. How many developers will this help?
2. How clear are the use cases?

Providing “complete control over the visual properties and interactive behaviors” is quite a bit. I think of “complete” as “everything” — which asks where you draw the line. Every single pixel at every resolution? Control over every conceivable mouse or keyboard event?

Even if it could be technically done on the framework side, the resulting markup would likely be so complex that you’d just wish for a way to do it with normal code (speaking from experience! :).

But there’s probably some middle ground. The key is to articulate exactly how you would expect this to work and how it would specifically help you make great software, then file it as a radar.

You might have also seen this:
http://mattgemmell.com/2008/02/24/skinnable-cocoa-ui-with-webkit-and-css

Apart from this, it’s nice to see a good new Cocoa blog on the Internet; keep it up!