Standard Radio Buttons

A standard radio button is a small circle followed by a line of text. If the button’s off, the circle is empty. If the button is on, the circle is filled in. If the button is mixed-state, the circle has a dash in it.

For example, this group of buttons displays that all the selected objects are green:

And this group displays that some of the selected objects are red and some are green:

A group of radio buttons is implemented with an NSMatrix object that contains several NSButtonCell instances and has a tracking mode of NSRadioModeMatrix. Whenever one of the matrix’s buttons is clicked, the matrix turns off the previously selected button and turns on the newly clicked one.

It’s easiest to create a group of switch buttons in Interface Builder. You can also make one programmatically by allocating an NSMatrix object and initializing it (in an invocation of initWithFrame:mode:prototype:numberOfRows:numberOfColumns:) with a prototype cell and a tracking mode of NSRadioModeMatrix. For the prototype object, create a NSButtonCell object with a type of NSRadioButton. Listing 1 illustrates how you might do this.

Listing 1  Creating a radio-button matrix programmatically

- (void)awakeFromNib {

    NSButtonCell *prototype = [[NSButtonCell alloc] init];

    [prototype setTitle:@"Watermelons"];

    [prototype setButtonType:NSRadioButton];

    NSRect matrixRect = NSMakeRect(20.0, 20.0, 125.0, 125.0);

    NSMatrix *myMatrix = [[NSMatrix alloc] initWithFrame:matrixRect

                                                    mode:NSRadioModeMatrix

                                               prototype:(NSCell *)prototype

                                            numberOfRows:3

                                         numberOfColumns:1];

    [[[typeField window] contentView] addSubview:myMatrix];

    NSArray *cellArray = [myMatrix cells];

    [[cellArray objectAtIndex:0] setTitle:@"Apples"];

    [[cellArray objectAtIndex:1] setTitle:@"Oranges"];

    [[cellArray objectAtIndex:2] setTitle:@"Pears"];

    [prototype release];

    [myMatrix release];

}

Icon Radio Buttons

You can also have a radio button that’s an icon button; that is, one that’s primarily identified by its icon and has little or no text. If the button’s off, it appears to be sticking in. If the button’s on, it appears to be pressed in. (An icon button cannot display the mixed state.)

You can create an group of icon radio buttons in either Interface Builder or programmatically. If you use Interface Builder, start with a matrix of push buttons. If you create it programmatically, create an matrix of buttons. Then change the matrix’s tracking mode to NSRadioModeMatrix. Change the buttons’ types to NSPushOnPushOffButton, their image positions to NSImageOnly, their bezel types to a square bezel type. Finally set their images to what you want.