iTunes or Xcode style information box at top of window

Question

What are my options to recreate the box at the top of iTunes in Cocoa, or like Apple uses in XCode 4?

Answer 1

I'd write a custom NSView. Draw the background and border yourself in drawRect:. You can use NSGradient to draw the filled background, or alternatively you could save it as an image and draw that. You could probably use a white NSShadow to get the embossed effect for the border.

Finally, to get your text on there, you could just add text fields as subviews of your new custom view.