Nobody learns if nothing is brok3n

YESSSS!!! Thanks, Chris!

http://angrymen.org/2007/02/10/weekly-cocoa-app-challenge-4/

I can't say that there's anything special in my solutions for this challenge, but they're there for the sake of completeness.

For anyone else participating, you may find the CocoaDevCentral tutorial linked to be a bit confusing. It heavily uses an NSDictionary named items, and does not explain what it holds. You can download the source at the end of the article to get a better idea, and there's also a very nice tutorial over at the CocoaDev Wiki: http://www.cocoadev.com/index.pl?NSToolbarTutorial

Chris, thanks for continuing this. It's just the sort of kick I need to learn something new about the Cocoa frameworks on a regular basis.

Here's my entry, it's only part one (for now) I'll do part two if I have time.

I'm a reasonably experienced cocoa developer, though I've been out of touch for a while. I learned NSToolbar the hard way with a fairly complex use of it in one of my apps (basically I used it to implement a tabbed-interface, which worked *really* well).
I love how cocoa implements toolbars. It's a lot of code to get it running (IB integration would be nice), but the end result is extremely flexible and can be *very* fast.

With all the tutorials I've seen, they create all the toolbar items as part of the application's launch process. This is just plain stupid if you ask me. The user will never have all the toolbars in use, and it might even be hidden. In my implementation toolbar items are created as late as possible (when the NSToolbar is about to draw an item to the screen), which reduces memory usage and results in slightly faster launch times (it's only a small improvement, but they add up quickly).

http://aadesign.ausdatahost.com/blog/2007/02/11/wcc-4-part-1/

While I can't say the programmatic approach is all that horrible, it is indeed far, far easier to do a toolbar with the generictoolbar framework. Nice to know how to do both, though.

The cocoadevcentral tutorial misses how to use default toolbar items, so I threw a couple into my programmatic approach as well. A bit more useful than a sheet full of "Item ##".

http://myztik.katan.com/?page_id=149

I've finally completed this one as well.

I've added a 'show toolbar/hide toolbar' and a 'customize toolbar…' menu item to the window menu (they can be made completely functional in IB, simply connect them to 1st responder's toggleToolbarShown: and runToolbarCustomizationPalette:, 1st responder takes care of the rest. it even swaps 'show toolbar' and 'hide toolbar')

It's great that everybody posts what they did -- I learned a lot by looking at all the solutions (only after I finished my own solution of course :-) ).

My attempt:

http://www.blurimage.com/cocoa/TwilightToolbar.zip