How do I switch out Views in a Cocoa application?

Posted by David Garcia on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by David Garcia
Published on 2010-07-17T18:08:34Z Indexed on 2013/10/31 15:54 UTC
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So I'm beginning to learn how to use Cocoa. I think I've pretty much got it but I'm hung up on creating and switching views. I'm rewriting a game I made a little bit ago for practice. All I want is one window (preferably not resizable) and I want to be able to switch out views for different screens in the game.

First, I have the main menu (Start Game, High Scores, Exit). Then I need a window for each screen (Gameplay screen, Highscore screen).

What I'm getting confused with is how to design this. I looked up NSViewController thinking it manages views but it doesn't. It only manages one view by loading it really. I don't understand why I'd need to use NSViewController then. Couldn't I just have a window class that contains multiple subclasses of NSView and load them like that? I'm not sure I understand the purpose of the ViewController.

Does my Window Class really need to subclass NSWindowController? I was trying to follow the example of Apple's ViewController example and it has a window controller class that's a subclass of NSWindowController. I don't see what the purpose was of subclassing that. All NSWindowController seems to add is - initWithPath:(NSString *)newPath but I fail to see the use in that either when I can just edit the plist file to open the window on start up. Apple's example also has an NSView variable and an NSViewController variable. Don't you only need one variable to store the current view?

Thanks in advance guys, I'm really confused as to how this works.

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