Trouble with mouseMoved and custom views

FROM : Christopher Drum
DATE : Thu Dec 23 18:18:21 2004

In a previous posting I had asked for help with mouseEntered and
mouseExited on a little color palette I was working on. My problem was
the order in which mouseEntered and mouseExited are called changes
depending upon the direction I move the mouse. The suggestion was to
use mouseMoved instead to track the mouse location within my custom
view and highlight color palette swatches using the mouse coordinates.
(Originally I had a tracking rect for each individual color palette
swatch)

This solution has helped me progress, but mouseMoved seems to carry
other issues with it.
Perhaps I'm just not groking something here, but as I understand
things...

   1. My custom view must be the initialFirstResponder for my window
(this is a single window app).
   2. My main window needs [mainWindow setAcceptsMouseMovedEvents:YES];
   
I can move the mouse cursor along my row of color swatches and they
will highlight to indicate the currently selected swatch. This all
worked just fine for me, until I started typing into an editable text
field. However, once I type into a text field, my palette view stops
accepting mouseMoved events and I can't figure out how to receive those
events again.

My color palette accepts color swatches dragged in from the app's color
wells. This drag and drop behavior continues to function perfectly.
Dragging a color swatch to the palette correctly highlights the
currently selected palette swatch. So, draggingEntered and
draggingUpdated don't seem to be affected by having focus on the text
field, just mouseMoved.

I thought I might need to manually adjust the current focus upon
mouseEntered into my palette view with:
   [[NSView focusView] unlockFocus];
    [self lockFocus];

However, this doesn't seem to be working.

So, how do I programatically make the text fields stop accepting
mouseMoved events, so that my custom view can receive those events
again? Also, how can I remove focus from a selected text field and
should I? Seems to me that the user would expect a selected text field
to stay selected, even if s/he is playing with the color swatches in a
palette.

------------------------------------------------------------------
Christopher Drum
http://homepage.mac.com/christopherdrum

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