Moving MFC icons to Cocoa

Working my way through the timeline MFC to Cocoa conversion I have once again bumped up against graphic resources. Various components in the UI have graphic resources (icons). Back when I was getting the basic engine to work I compiled out all things of this ilk with a huge amount of other things with a

#define _NO_UI.

A part of my approach is that the structure of the new UI follows the PC version very closely so I am bumping into the way that Icons are handled within Cello as a whole. Basically this I am gradually working my way through some of these #if _NO_UI blocks.

Existing graphic resources in the PC version are stored as .bmp files. Each file typically has a number of icons. The various components that comprise the system (such as the 20-30 effects) have factory functions that specify a name for the component, and a bitmap resource with an offset as an icon. This is achieved by all the components inheriting from a base class that maintains this. The upshot is that I have to tackle this base class and bring it into line, and because I hit the constructor, I also have to attend to the many sub-classes that use icons.

In the OSX version of Cello I use NSImage to represent an icon - and as an alternative to specifying an icon resource and offset simply specify a name. This name is the name is nothing more than the filename that of the icon that appears in the bundle. I have written a really simple wrapper based on boost intrusive_ptr that wraps the NSImage for use in C++. The existing icons are appropriate to Windows and will look really out of place in OSX but that is a problem for another day and a problem that I hope to hand over to an icon designer. For place-holder icons I take the existing icons bring them to my old Power-PC and use an old copy of Photoshop to turn them into individual PNG files.