Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!uflorida!haven!uvaarpa!hudson!bessel.acc.Virginia.EDU!gl8f
From: gl8f@bessel.acc.Virginia.EDU (Greg Lindahl)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: GEM programming
Keywords: GEM
Message-ID: <604@hudson.acc.virginia.edu>
Date: 4 Oct 88 03:16:38 GMT
References: <586@sdcc15.UUCP>
Sender: news@hudson.acc.virginia.edu
Reply-To: gl8f@Virginia.EDU (Greg Lindahl)
Organization: Dept. of Astronomy, University of Virginia
Lines: 58

In article <586@sdcc15.UUCP> pa1132@sdcc15.UUCP () writes:
>
>Here is some questions about GEM:

I suspect that someone more experienced will answer, but here's what
I know on the topic (not much!)

>
> [ stuff deleted ]
>  Is there any way to modify the AES so we can get rid of the memory
>  limitation?
>

Atari might be able to do that, but who knows. Haven't heard them say
the limit was raised in TOS 1.4. If you have too many windows things
get very cluttered anyway. This isn't a Sun with space for 4 or 5 big
windows on the screen at once.

>  2.  How to get the menus to appear on other parts of the screen
>  instead of the top line of the screen?  I have seen some desk accs
>  to have  menu bar under their window title bar.  How is that done?
>

You'd have to write your own menu handling routines. The standard ones
are easy to use, but limited.

>  3.  How to get bottons, editable (spelling?) text fields and other
>  objects, that used to appear in dialog boxes, to appear in a window?

You can write your own dialog handler and integrate it with code to
handle it being in a window (redrawing it, moving, sizing, etc.) Tim
Oren's ProGEM columns provide an alternate dialog handler which would
make a good start. This is also the only way to provide non-modal
dialogs, which are nice in a lot of situations.

>  4.  How to  modify the appearance of windows?  For example, in
>  PageMaker for the Mac, icons are added to the border of windows to
>  show the current page.  Is that kind of trick possible under GEM?

Laser C does this but I'm not sure how. I assume that they simply open
a window and draw the border elements themselves. When the mouse is in
the window, they essentially operate the window and border elements
like a big dialogue and internally generate messages for arrows being
clicked on, etc.

You could try to trick GEM by, for example, drawing the page number inside
of the vertical slider box each time you reposition it. However, you'd
have to be very careful to make sure that GEM never erases it without
it being redrawn.

>
>  PageMaker is a trademark.    

yawn.

--------------
Greg Lindahl                              internet:  gl8f@virginia.edu
U Va Dept. of Astronomy                   bitnet:    gl8f@virginia.bitnet