Library Columns In L5 For Mac
When you want to find a specific song or album in your iTunes library, you can use the Search field at the top-right of the application’s window and type part of its title. But one efficient way to access the content in your iTunes library is to use the iTunes Column Browser. Curiously, Apple doesn’t like showing iTunes with the Column Browser visible: the company tends to want to show big icons in Grid view, or even bigger covers in Cover Flow view. (I discussed the.) But the Column Browser is an effective way for drilling down into your music, books, and videos, and also a way to get an overview of your content. Here’s how it works, and how you can use it to make navigating iTunes easier. Showing the Column Browser When viewing any of your libraries or playlists in iTunes, you can display the Column Browser: to do so, press Command-B, or choose View - Column Browser - Show Column Browser. By default, if you’ve never used the Column Browser before, it display at the left of your content.
Here's the column browser in its simplest form, displaying at the left of a music library. ITunes displays just one column in the browser at first: the Artists column. But you can add more columns by choosing View - Column Browser and checking the columns you’d like to display. You can choose among Genres, Artists, Albums, Composers, and Groupings. You can also choose to group compilations and use album artists if you wish. The latitude you have for displaying these additional columns depends, in part, on the size of your display. If you show too many columns, you’ll need to scroll horizontally to see some of the information in your library’s List view or Album List view.
(Though if you use Grid View, this won’t be a problem.) The principle of the Column Browser is simple: each time you select an item in the first column, the number of items shown in the second column reduces. So if you have, say, Genres in the first column (you can’t change the order of the columns you choose to display), clicking on one genre only shows those artists whose music is in that genre. Clicking on an artist whittles down the selection in the main part of the iTunes window to just the music by that artist. The column browser seems more logical to me when it displays at the top of the window. But before you decide to use the Column Browser in its default location, try out displaying it at the top of the window, by choosing View - Column Browser - On Top. With the Column Browser at the top of the window, your lists in the individual columns will display less, yet having additional columns doesn’t eat into the space used to display information about your content. The above screen shot shows just three columns, Genres, Artists and Albums, but you can choose, as with the left-sided Column Browser, to also display Composers and Groupings if you wish.
Library Columns In L5 For Macro
You can also change the amount of space the Column Browser takes up by dragging the separator between it and the list view section of the window. When to use the Column Browser When you choose to display the Column Browser in one part of iTunes, it doesn’t display everywhere. If you display it while in your Music library, it won’t show up in your Movies, TV Shows, or Books libraries, for example, or in any of your playlists. You need to turn it on for each item where you want to use it. You may find it useful—as I do—to show the Column Browser in your Music library, because it makes it much easier to find content (most of us have a lot more music than any other media type in iTunes). Instead of searching for your content when you want to play an album, it’s much easier to click on a genre, then an artist, then an album to play it.
But in, say, your Movies library, unless you have a lot of movies, you won’t gain much by using it. You can use it in any playlist, and there are some cases where this may be useful. If you group all the albums of a certain artist in a playlist, for example, using the Column Browser (in this case, displaying it on the left is the most logical) lets you select an album by clicking its name in the Albums column. I also find the Column Browser useful in my Books library, as I can see the names of all the authors present there, and select any of them easily. If you have a lot of TV shows, this is practical is well. So if you don’t use it, try out the Column Browser.
Library Columns In L5 For Mac
It’s an efficient way to navigate among your iTunes content, and makes it easier to find, and play, what you want. Senior contributor Kirk McElhearn writes about more than just Macs on his blog.
Twitter: Kirk’s latest book is.
Important: This document is no longer being updated. For the latest information about Apple SDKs, visit the. A table view displays data for a set of related records, with rows representing individual records and columns representing the attributes of those records. For example, in a table of employee records, each row represents one employee, and the columns might represent employee attributes such as the last name, first name, and office location.
A table view can have a single column or multiple columns, and it allows vertical and horizontal scrolling, content selection, and column dragging. Each row in a table view has at least one corresponding cell that represents a field in a data collection.
Note: The generic term cell is used to describe the content within a row and column in a table view. When it’s necessary to refer to the NSCell class and its subclasses, the class name is specified. At a Glance Understanding the structure of a table view, and knowing how to build one, lets you create Mac apps that present tabular data in an attractive, functional way. Tables Use a Collection of Classes to Manage Content The various components of a table view—including column, row, header, and cell—are each supported by a distinct subclass.
These classes work together with the class itself to display content and to enable behaviors such as animation, column rearrangement, sorting, and selection. And, because most tables use NSView objects to represent individual cells, it’s easy to design custom cell views in Interface Builder and to support animation and column management. Relevant Chapter: Interface Builder Makes It Easy to Create Tables Using Interface Builder, you add a table view to a window or superview, add and arrange columns, and specify column headers.
Then, you typically create cell view prototypes that your app uses to provide the content layout for each table cell. (If you’re working with an NSCell-based table, you create subclasses of NSCell for each table cell.) Many aspects of tables can be set directly in Interface Builder, which means that you can avoid writing additional code. Relevant Chapter:, Tables Can Get Data in Two Ways You must provide data to the table view. You can do this in one of two ways:. Programmatically, by implementing a data source class. Using Cocoa bindings To provide data programmatically, you create a class that conforms to the protocol and implement the method that provides the row and column data as requested. Wd my passport 1tb manual. Use Cocoa bindings to create a relationship between a controller class instance, which manages the interaction between data objects, and the table view.
When you use the bindings approach, you don’t create a data source class for providing the data or supporting editing. The techniques you use to create and populate a table differ depending on whether the table is NSView based or NSCell based. Relevant Chapters:, NSCell-Based Tables Are Still Supported In OS X v10.6 and earlier, each table view cell was required to be a subclass of. This approach caused limitations when designing complex custom cells, often requiring you to write your own NSCell subclasses. Providing animation, such as progress views, was also extremely difficult. In this document these types of table views are referred to as NSCell-based table views. NSCell-based tables continue to be supported in OS X v10.7 and later, but they’re typically used only to support legacy code.
In general, you should use NSView-based tables. Although you use the same Interface Builder techniques to create both NSView-based and NSCell-based table views (and to add columns to a table), the code required to provide individual cells, populate the table view, and support programmatic editing differs depending on the table type. In addition, you use different Cocoa bindings techniques depending on whether you’re working with an NSView-based or NSCell-based table. Relevant Chapter: Prerequisites To develop successfully with the class, you need a strong grasp of the design pattern. To learn more about this fundamental pattern, see. NSTableView instances can be used with Cocoa bindings, both in NSView-based and NSCell-based tables.
However, it’s strongly suggested that you thoroughly understand the programmatic interface of the table view before beginning to use the more advanced Cocoa bindings. For a brief overview of bindings, see; to learn more, read. To learn about the recommended appearance and behavior of table views in the user interface, see OS X Human Interface Guidelines.