How can I highlight the cells of a IKImageBrowserView on mouse over?

Question

I would like to provide some feedback when the mouse is over on one of the cells of an IKImageBrowserView.

Specifically, I'd like to resize the cell a little, to make it appear slightly larger on mouse-over. Alternatively, highlighting the background/border would be fine.

Unfortunately, IKImageBrowserCell is not a subclass of NSCell, but rather NSObject, and I can't find the solution in the APIs. Any ideas?

Answer 1

You could try subclassing IKImageBrowserView and adding an NSTrackingArea to the visible rect. You could then implement -mouseMoved: to work with the tracking area to locate the correct image cell using -indexOfItemAtPoint: then get its frame by using -itemFrameAtIndex:.

Rather than try to muck with IKImageBrowserView's black-box layers and drawing, you could add your own layer (or borderless window) above the newly-discovered frame and use standard animations to grow/shrink/animate/glow/shake/whatever this "cheat" cell. Let clicks "pass through" (and hide your "cheat" cell) so the normal drag-and-drop mechanism works the same. IKImageBrowserView has its own -setForegroundLayer: method that allows you to add an "overlay layer" - perfectly suited for this purpose, I'd imagine.

That'd be my first attempt at solving this problem if it were my own.