Drawing in views : background in custom views

Sometimes it could be usefull to have a background image in view instead of a color. For example if we want to have a texture in a view.

In the following example I draw a 'wall' as the background of a view :


The texture I want to apply to my view is the following :



Now its very easy to define this as a texture, you just create a new color , and not just a color but a colorpattern :

Step 1 : find the texture in my resources

NSString* fileName = [[NSBundle mainBundle] pathForResource: @"wall" ofType:@"jpg"];

NSURL* url = [NSURL fileURLWithPath: fileName];

Step 2 : upload the image from the URL
background = [[NSImage alloc] initWithContentsOfURL: url];

Step 3 : define a new color

color = [NSColor colorWithPatternImage:background ] ;
[color set] ;

Step 4 : fill the background
NSRectFill( [self bounds] ) ;

Note that you need to implement this code also in the drawRect: method, to ensure that each time your view get's redrawn that the background is drawn also.

Tetris and Maze

I'm currently busy extending the Tetris application with some visual's, more features like highscores, levels etc.

I come back to that because I found some nice things with the NSImage class.

I'm also busy with a Maze application, the purpose will be to escape a maze using the SMS (so this will be for Macbook  and Powerbook only).