#nsstackview

Over the years of hacking for iPhone, I’ve accumulated a certain self confidence in regards of Apples development environment and their frameworks. I know my way around Xcode if you will.

The other day I took this can-do-attitude and dove head first into MacOS development. This swimming pool wasn’t too deep apparently and I was stuck after one minute trying to make a NSStackView scrollable... This. Should. Not. Be. This. Hard. Where’s all these views coming from!? What’s a NSClipView?!

Anyway - I found some obscure e-mail thread on the deep web (aka not-the-first-google-result) that gave me a few hints - which eventually led to a perfectly scrollable NSStackView.

I thought I’d share this with you - the interwebz - if someone is having the same problems I had.

In the interest of not making this tutorial way too verbose: create a new project, open storyboard, add the components.. yeah - you know the drill.

Add the views and select the inner most NSView

Add constraints to that NSView

Leading, top and trailing

Select the NSStackView

Add constraints to the NSStackView

Leading, top, trailing and bottom

Admire your creation

The stack should now scroll just fine! But as you might see, it’s building from the bottom and up. This wasn’t the behaviour I was going for..

In order to fix that, we’re going to have to create a subclass of NSClipView and override the property “isFlipped” and return true. Then change the class of the NSClipView in interface builder.