Chad Weider

Apple’s badges are excellent. Apart from just looking good (notice the subtle shading on the right) and standing out, they are effective.

The fundamentals of any good interface should always be, most important, simplicity; next, consistency and after that, specificity. And these badges are just that, they send a simple, clear and consistent message to the user – “there ## number of things you care about *right here*”.

But to dig a little deeper… what makes these badges excellent? – the fact that they pervade the user’s environment, that’s what is key.

When badges pop up any time you drag messages in Mail, songs in iTunes, people in Address Book, or pictures in iPhoto, for users, the little icons send more then just a message, they convey meaning and a sense of familiarity.

When a badge comes up on one of my dock icons I know there is something at that application that I ought to check out (in a timely – but not quite urgent fashion). It doesn’t matter what the meaning is – the message is the same regardless of the fact that they may mean errors in xCode, unanswered messages in iChat, or unread messages in Mail.

And so it’s a shame that AppKit doesn’t doesn’t provide a way to create badges for your own OS X apps – developers, I’m sure, would love to tap into this useful interface element. Apple devs probably wouldn’t mind either – as it stands each and every app that uses the badges has its own copy of the badge images… and NSApp doesn’t provide a private method either (I’ve checked).

Download CTBadge ~150 KB

But these badges are just too good to pass up (no, really, they are) so here are a few tiny methods that’ll do the work for you.

As a side note, notice how the badge in iTunes is noticeably different than the badge in Mail/iPhoto/etc? [Radar 4402569](rdar://problem/4402569)

Update: Updates and other info will be maintained at [svn.oofn.net](http://svn.oofn.net/#CTBadge).

So you want to put a graph in your application?

Graphs are great things, they’re a great way to pimp out an app (provided you are doing something data-ish). But right now there aren’t a whole lot of options when it comes to adding graph goodies too your applications if your a cocoa developer. — Not Cool. sigh.

So if you want to add graphing you have these options:

+ Apple’s GraphKit framework If you have access to the documentation then that’s the way to go. Unfortunatly that’s a little hard to come by if you’re outside of Apple. I’ve heard GraphKit almost made it public with Tiger. . . but didn’t — sigh.

+ SM2DGraphView from [Snowmint Creative Solutions](http://snowmintcs.com). [SM2DGraphView](http://developer.snowmintcs.com/frameworks/sm2dgraphview/index.html) is _ok_, but I’m not too crazy about it. API doesn’t allow for for a whole lot (at least not what I wanted) and the source isn’t _that_ conducive to customization. Also I’m not too sure about how it handles ‘special’ floating point values (NaN, etc.).

+ Roll your own, Well if 1) and 2) won’t work you don’t have much of an option then… problem is making your own takes time and, well, it’s usually not worth all that time.

So what to do? well 1) and 2) didn’t work for me, and the app I was making _was_ the graph so, eh – I didn’t have much of a choice, I had to take 3).

Keeping in mind that I (as well as other people) did not want to have to go through doing number 3 again in the future, I figured I would take some extra time and start the beginnings of a decent cocoa graphing class.

The two major goals for the project:

+ Low barrier to entry, I want people to say “hey, a graph would look good here” and to be able to plug a graph right in, without having to muck around figuring out how to do all of this graphing stuff. As a consequence I’ve chosen to do a few things inefficiently (NSTableView style DataSource), but in the hope that usability will benefit.

+ Extendability/Customizability I’m not going to be able to anticipate how people will want to graph their data, so I’ve made a point of, if not implementing a functionality, (hopefully) making it easy enough to add that functionality with a subclass or thereabouts.

That was a year or so ago, since then all my code has by laying by the wayside, lonely and neglected. These past few months I figured I would dust it off a bit and do a bit more work on it.

I figure now it’s about fit for public consumption. So, if your in the mood to do some graphing eat your heart out.

[GraphX Framework](http://blog.oofn.net/projects/graphx) – project page