Lego-Style Cocoa Workflow Application

Question

Hi,

I currently have to develop a system very similar to MIT's Scratch's UI. In case you don't know it, here a screenshot: http://kidconfidence.com/blogs/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/scratch1.png

Basically you have bricks in the library on the left you can drop into the window on the right side. The problem I have is that I'm new to Cocoa and not sure what would be the best way to accomplish that.

Because you can nest these bricks sometimes and other times stick them together I wonder if there is something that would help implementing that. I recognize this is not a very common interface that there are probably no implementations of that around, but maybe there are helpers for parts of this.

Regards, Armin

Answer 1

Edit: switching to desktop

There are no standard cocoa controls that you could leverage for the building blocks. You will probably want to subclass NSControl to make your standard brick object.

The list on the left could be an NSTableView. The main work area can be an NSScrollView.

You probably want to use your own brick hierarchy independent of the view hierarchy because of the freeform dragging.