Faking OS X text field behaviour (was: Good books on Cocoa dev?)

[Peter Brigham MD]

On Mar 3, 2010, at 7:37 PM, Richard Gaskin wrote:

> Ian Wood wrote:
>> I just had a quick try but can't see how to apply a backgroundpattern
>> to anything less than the whole field.
>
> Mea culpa.
>
> According to the dictionary RevTalk allows backgroundColor for  
> chunks, and backgroundPattern for fields, and textPattern/ 
> foregroundPattern for chunks, so I was a little optimistic about the  
> orthogonality of the implementation.
>
> But in trying it here, you're right, it seems the backgroundPattern  
> cannot be applied to chunks.
>
> This inconsistency seems worth addressing, since doing so has  
> practical application as you've noted, so I logged it as a request:
>
> <http://quality.runrev.com/qacenter/show_bug.cgi?id=8645>

Is this one of those "why not just do it, looks simple" things that  
runs into the apparently huge complexity of the field object? Which I  
seem to recall Scott Raney describing as the "monster" it terms of  
complexity.

Meanwhile, Firefox and other browsers use backgroundcolor to identify  
found text, so that technique is not foreign to  most users, though  
it's not quite what would be perfect. But as the late Robert Parker  
said (via Spenser), "It's almost never perfect."

-- Peter

Peter M. Brigham
pmbrig at gmail.com
http://home.comcast.net/~pmbrig