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Setting a Window’s Appearance

You usually configure most aspects of a window’s appearance in Interface Builder. Sometimes, however, you may need to create a window programmatically, or alter its appearance after it has been created.

Contents:

Setting a Window’s Style
Setting a Window’s Color and Transparency

Setting a Window’s Style

The peripheral elements that a window displays define its style. Though you can’t access and manipulate them directly, you can determine at initialization whether a window has them by providing a style mask to the initializer. There are four possible style elements, specifiable by combining their mask values using the C bitwise OR operator:

You can also specify NSBorderlessWindowMask, in which case none of these style elements is used.

Typically you set a window’s appearance once, when it is first created. Sometimes, however, you want to enable or disable a button in the title bar to reflect changed context. To do this you first retrieve the button from the window using the NSWindow standardWindowButton: method and then set its enabled state, as in the following example.

NSButton *closeButton = [window standardWindowButton:NSWindowCloseButton];

[closeButton setEnabled:NO];

The constants required to access standard title bar widgets are defined in the API reference for NSWindow.

Setting a Window’s Color and Transparency

You can set a window’s background color and transparency using the methods setBackgroundColor: and setAlphaValue:, respectively.

You can set a window’s background color to a nonopaque color. This does not affect the window’s title bar, and only makes the background itself transparent if the window itself is not opaque, as illustrated in the following example.

[myWindow setOpaque:NO]; // YES by default

NSColor *semiTransparentBlue =

    [NSColor colorWithDeviceRed:0.0 green:0.0 blue:1.0 alpha:0.5];

[myWindow setBackgroundColor:semiTransparentBlue];

Views placed on a nonopaque window with a transparent background color retain their own opacity. If you want to make the entire window—including the title bar and views placed on the window—transparent, you should use setAlphaValue:.

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