Cocoa: Remove NSView

Question

I'm doing an exercise in learning and at the same time making a game for my kid. He has one of those card games (like Pokemon) and we scanned a bunch in and are attempting to make a game where he can play against the "computer". So the game process is you need to start by selecting your cards. What I've done is have a class (Card (sub of NSView) that gets instantiated by an IBOutlet (button) and drops the first card on the screen as well as scroll buttons - each time a scroll button is clicked it determines what the next card should be and then calls a method (makeCard) which also instantiates a new Card.

I'm fuzzy about what cocoa is doing here. Card basically has, in its drawRect a call to a texture atlas and I pass in the coordinates of the current card to display. That means that each time I instantiate Card a new NSView is being made, correct? I am essentially building a stack of NSViews in my app (since the x, y, w h) of each card is the same I can't tell but that seems like logically what is happening. It doesn't have an effect on app speed but it seems like unnecessary clutter.

Is there a way that I can just update the image in one instance of a view rather than instantiating a Card for each one I want to show? And regardless of that answer, how do I then remove the view from the window once the set up process is complete? [view removeFromSuperview]?

To be clear, I do not want a visual representation of the card anymore. There just the eye candy for the set up part of the game as all the card data (including texture atlas coordinates) are stored in a dictionary.

Also, since I am asking questions here, how would I, without an NSImage, be able to scale the images from the texture atlas. They are 180x250px each but down the road they'll be represented in a holding area and I'd rather they can't be that size.

Answer 1

An answer to part of your question, since I can't figure out the rest of it:

CGImageCreateWithImageInRect will let you create a reference to a part of a larger image, as in your texture atlas. You can then create a NSImage from that (if you're using 10.6 or later, with -[NSImage initWIthCGImage:size:], otherwise you'll need to create a NSBitmapImageRep first). Then you can display the NSImage in a NSTableView cell, NSCollectionView or NSImageView.