Creating Mac application requires lots of though and effort into creating a good user experience too. Although generally Cocoa API and tools allow us spend more time on this, there are areas that could benefit from additional effort. When developing Startupizer 2.0, one such area I wanted to address was nicer about window with scrolling credits. This blog post demonstrates the solution I chose.

With OS X 10.7 Lion, Apple has introduced many cool features to it’s AppKit. One of those that caught my attention right away, was view based table views. It seemed like the missing widget I was looking for when implementing Startupizer’s items list. So I decided to take a spin as a research for directions for 2.0 release. In this post, I’ll go step by step through a small project gradually adding features until it will look similar to current main window.

In a project I work on a need arose to have iPhone like on/off switch including the animation. Since I already use Core Animation for other purposes, a custom layer was immediate choice. I was bit surprised by not being able to find an example on internet, so I rolled out my own. In this post I’ll demonstrate the implementation I chose.