Membrane Button Control 1.0

Membrane Button is a powerful implentation of push, toggle and drop-down menu button controls that appear similar to "membrane" controls used in electronics.

Membrane Button is available to Universal binary Carbon & Cocoa-based apps on Mac OS X 10.3.9 and newer. Why build when you can buy?

Membrane Button is a user interface control that emulates the appearance of membrane buttons for use in third-party apps on Mac OS X 10.3.9 or newer. Similar button controls are found in Garageband and parts of Mac OS X 10.4, both from Apple. All aspects of the control are drawn using Quartz assuring consistent appearance across OS versions and between Carbon/Cocoa-based applications.

Compare Membrane Button to static image-based controls via this table.
Membrane Button controls work only in a compositing or metal-style window in Carbon apps, or any window in Cocoa apps. All drawing is done using Core Graphics, no pre-made images are used for maximum integration into the window. Membrane Button includes push and toggle-style buttons plus a drop-down menu control.

Membrane Button controls can display Unicode-savvy text only or both text and icon. Text labels are automatically truncated if the text is too long to be displayed in the control. Text, icons and various control settings can be changed dynamically via a simple API or stored in Carbon and Cocoa nib bundles.

? Requires additional code to be written for the image-based control, or multiple distinct images for each variation. ? Requires a single framework be added to the app bundle.

One Control to Rule Them All

Now with a native Cocoa implementation you can deploy these controls in the vast majority of Mac OS X-platform software and benefit from an identical appearance, behavior and feature set.

Membrane buttons integrate fully into the advanced application framework built into Mac OS X called Cocoa. With Membrane button for Cocoa you can wire objects to controls, change text labels and adjust the controls behaviors directly in Interface Builder.

Membrane button for Cocoa also fully supports NSMatrix functionality. Creating a matrix of related controls reduces the overhead that is normally required to manage a large number of individual controls.

Currently Membrane Button looks best with a height of 20 px or higher; 20 and 22 pixel controls are shown in the sample images on this web page. Membrane button switches to a larger text size automatically if the control is taller than 20px.
For the drop-down menu variant you simply create a menu in your app (via NIB, resource or programmatically) and provide it to the Membrane Button drop-down control using a simple delegate function call in your apps code.

Can you tell which of the following windows is Carbon and which is Cocoa-based? Mouse over each image for the answer.