Cocoa Programming for OS X: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide

Views, Rectangles, and Coordinate Systems

When a window appears on screen, Cocoa must position each view in the window’s hierarchy. To know how to position a view, Cocoa needs two pieces of information:

• the origin, or position of the lower-left corner of the view in relation to the lower-left corner of its superview

• the size of the rectangle occupied by the view

frame

The position and size of the view are specified by its frame property, which is an NSRect.

 ​ ​s​t​r​u​c​t​ ​N​S​R​e​c​t​ ​{​
 ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​v​a​r​ ​o​r​i​g​i​n​:​ ​N​S​P​o​i​n​t​
 ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​v​a​r​ ​s​i​z​e​:​ ​N​S​S​i​z​e​
 ​ ​}​

The origin of the frame specifies the position of the lower-left corner as the offset from the superview’s lower-left ...