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From: lsr@apple.UUCP (Larry Rosenstein)
Newsgroups: net.micro.mac
Subject: Re: Palettes: suggestions on how to do them
Message-ID: <2106@apple.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 16-Oct-85 21:02:50 EDT
Article-I.D.: apple.2106
Posted: Wed Oct 16 21:02:50 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 18-Oct-85 01:15:42 EDT
References: <194@mmm.UUCP> <3128@ut-sally.UUCP>
Reply-To: lsr@apple.UUCP (Larry Rosenstein)
Distribution: net
Organization: Advanced Development Group, Apple Computer
Lines: 52

There are a number of ways to do palettes according to what you like
best; there is no "right" way.  There are 2 issues to think about.
How to implement the palette and where to implement it.

I agree that using the Dialog Manager is overkill.  Palettes are
generally very regular in structure, so it is only a matter of
divising coordinates to get the palette item a user clicks in.  In
addition, you would have to go to a fair amount of work to get the
Dialog Manager to display all the little symbols you wanted.

As far as showing your palettes, there are several possibilities:

	in the window (as in MacDraw)
	globally (as in MacPaint)
	in graphical menus (used in MacDraw)
	
Each has advantages and disadvantages.  One advantage of menus is that
they are available regardless of the position of the document windows
on the screen.  (If MacPaint had resizable windows, then you might
want to make the window the full screen size sometimes, which would
cover the palettes.)  

In PageMaker, the Toolbox window is a regular window with title bar,
that is in front of the document window.  The document window's title
bar is also highlighted.  It appears that the program makes the
Toolbox window the "ghost window", because clicks in the document
window are processed as it that window was frontmost.

If you store a windowPtr in the ghost window low memory location,
then the FrontWindow call will never report that window as the
frontmost, even if it is.

The idea of modifying the grayRgn variable to affect each window's
visRgn, as described by robdye@sally.UUCP (Rob Dye), is very clever.
There is not good answer to the problem he described (his palette
shows up on top of DAs and Dialogs!).

One way would be to change the visRgn of just the windows belonging
to his application.  This would have to be done when the palette or a
document window is opened/closed/moved.  Making the palette a real
window and setting it up as the ghost window might help in this
respect.




-- 
Larry Rosenstein
Apple Computer

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