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.

Most modern Mac applications are designed around single window / multiple views architecture. Examples are iPhoto, iMovie etc. Although this results in more streamlined user experience, it brings some issues for the developers.