It’s the Alpha
Someone asked in the OSX Development community on LiveJournal about how to replicate the sort of translucent bezel window used by the volume/brightness adjustments. After a little bit of thought, I was intrigued enough to try to replicate it on my own:
It turns out not to be difficult at all. There’s a lot to be said about programming for a graphics environment that wasn’t originally designed for the computers of the ’80s. I was going to write up something of a tutorial, but I’ve fallen into my usual pattern: now that I’ve solved the interesting bits, I’m not much motivated to do anything else. So if you want to see how it’s done, I’ve posted my XCode project. If you’re familiar with Cocoa, it should be pretty obvious what’s going on. Feel free to base your own code on it; I only ask that you send me a copy of your software if you use it verbatim in a commercial product.
