I want a beautiful custom window for my first cocoa app

Question

Hi! I'm a graphic designer - turned web designer - turned web developer - who is currently trying to turn into a mac developer. I've nearly done programming my first app. Is a very, very simple application but I'm happy because I'm learning a lot of new stuff.

The problem is: I don't like how it looks.

As you may guess, design is a very big deal for me, and I think that an app like this, that is very simple, should at least look very good. I'd like to do something like this: http://transmissionapps.com/ a custom window, with custom colors et all.

I Think that I've already went trough half of the internet looking for info, but I didn't found anything I could make sense of. Maybe you can point me in the right direction on how to:

1) Customize the look of my main window 2) Customize the appearance of a table view. 3) Just the same with buttons.

If you know of any sample code, that will be great, I'm becoming obsessed with looking at somebody else's code.

Thanks! (sorry for the long post and the bad english)

Answer 1

Check out Apple's sample application, it may be what your looking for.

Answer 2

What about Drawing a custom window on Mac OS X? Seems like that will get you a custom window to start.

Answer 3

Check out Brandon Walkin's BWToolkit.

http://brandonwalkin.com/bwtoolkit/

It has a bunch of nice looking UI elements for use in IB. It also has source code so you can modify it for your own needs.

Answer 4

In this blog http://mactale.blogspot.com/2010/02/tale-about-windows-and-there-appearance.html you can find some advices, i hope.