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Split View

Give subviews max and min sizes, specify which subviews should resize, set divider colors, and hook up buttons to collapse subviews with animation – all from inside Interface Builder.

Selectable Toolbar

Create preferences windows and tabbed sheets without writing a line of code.

Make an iCal-style interface in 3 minutes

Note: This is currently in an experimental phase. Not recommended for use in production apps.

Set up a Preferences window

Set up a tabbed sheet

Transparent Controls

BWToolkit contains a suite of controls for HUD windows including: a button, pop-up button, check box, slider, text field, text view, table view, and a check box cell.

See the suite of Transparent Controls

Button Bars

Add an anchored button bar (to be placed directly below a view), anchored buttons, and unanchored buttons (+/- buttons that aren’t anchored to a view).

Create a Mail.app-style interface

Bottom Bars

See your window’s bottom bar in IB while you’re creating your interface. Choose from four sizes: mini, small, regular, and a large one for sheets.

Sheet Controller

Rapidly create and prototype sheets with the Sheet Controller. Sheets added to your nib or xib will even work in the Interface Builder simulator.

Toolbar Item with Customizable Identifier

Specify the identifiers of your toolbar items right in the inspector. Useful in cases where you need to access toolbar items from code.

Bottom Bar Controls

Add an iTunes-style slider to your bottom bar with built in speaker and photo indicators. For displaying text, use the provided inset text field.

Hyperlink Button

Easily add hyperlink text and images to your interface.

Fonts and Colors Toolbar Items

The fonts and colors toolbar icons from the recently released iWork ’09 are provided.

Gradient Box

Add a gradient box to your interface with customizable border and inset lines.

Styled Text Field

Apply a gradient and a shadow to text right from within IB with the Styled Text Field.

BWToolkit is an Interface Builder plugin that contains commonly used UI elements and other objects designed to simplify Mac development.

Double click the BWToolkit.ibplugin file to load the plugin into Interface Builder.

Interface Builder will keep a reference to this file. Store it in a location where it won’t be deleted.

Open the Xcode project you want to use the plugin with.

Right click the Linked Frameworks folder and select Add ▸ Existing Frameworks. Select BWToolkitFramework.framework.

Right click your target and select Add ▸ New Build Phase ▸ New Copy Files Build Phase. For the destination, select Frameworks and leave the path field blank.

Drag the BWToolkit framework from Linked Frameworks to the Copy Files build phase.

If you need to reference BWToolkit objects in your classes, you can import the main header like so:

#import <BWToolkitFramework/BWToolkitFramework.h>

Version 1.2.5 - January 20, 2010

1. •Split view: Fixed bug where min/max sizes wouldn’t work
   

2. •Split view: Added support for thick vertical dividers
   

3. •Split view: Added support for multiple resizable anchored button bars
   

4. •Split view: Fixed design-time undo and document dirtying
   

5. •Split view: Fixed all known memory leaks
   

6. •Split view: Fixed bug where after manually collapsing a subview, it wasn’t possible to uncollapse it (fix by Sean Patrick O’Brien)
   

7. •Split view: Fixed bug where scrollers would resize during a collapse animation
   

8. •Split view: Fixed a design-time resizing glitch
   

9. •Split view: Fixed bug where it wouldn’t send out splitViewDidResizeSubviews and splitViewWillResizeSubviews notifications
   

10. •Transparent checkbox: Rewritten to behave like a standard checkbox (fixed issue where it wouldn’t truncate text properly)
    

11. •Anchored button bar: Fixed issue where inspector wouldn’t update when selecting another button bar
    

12. •Textured slider: Fixed bug where knob focus ring wouldn’t draw
    

13. •Anchored button and unanchored button have been rewritten to behave like a standard button (fixed image scaling and alternate image support)
    

14. •Rewrote anchored pop up button to behave like a standard button and added support for pop up style (in addition to pull down)
    

15. •Gradient box: Can now set fill to ‘None’ in IB
    

16. •Styled text field: Fixed crash/leak issue (thanks Trevor Squires and Mike Ash)
    

17. •The framework now builds 32/64-bit on 10.5 and 10.6
    

18. •The .ibplugin now builds 32-bit on 10.5 and 32/64-bit on 10.6 (thanks Joey Hagedorn)
    

19. •Prefixed category method names with “bw” to avoid collisions

10.6 users: Download BWToolkit.

10.5 users: Build BWToolkit from source.

See a list of known issues, file bugs, and submit feature requests on our issue tracker. To contribute code, send me a patch over email.