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From: amanda@lts.UUCP (Amanda Walker)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: Changing complicated Dialogs into Windows (TechNote 203)
Summary: Prototyper(tm) will do a lot of this for you
Message-ID: <713@lts.UUCP>
Date: 6 Oct 88 16:21:14 GMT
References: <4209@polya.Stanford.EDU> <10050021@eecs.nwu.edu>
Organization: Learning Tree Software, Reston VA
Lines: 26

I have found that the Dialog Manager is only really useful for modal
dialogs and very, very simple modeless ones.  For a modeless dialog
of any complexity, it's easier to treat it as a window, as far as the
programming effort goes.  The biggest advantage of using the Dialog Manager
is that you can use things like ResEdit to design and/or customize the
dialog's appearance.  If you're doing everything yourself, you don't
get this advantage, unless you (as several people suggest) write code
to parse DITLs yourself.

Another approach, which is most useful for people who are working in Pascal,
is to use Prototyper from Smethers-Barnes.  Yes, it has a few bugs, but
it will let you lay out a window a little more easily than ResEdit, and
then generate the code and CNTL resources for it.  It will handle all of
the standard dialog components, as well as lines and boxes, scrolling lists,
multiple fonts, icon buttons (which are an interesting idea), and so on.

It's often easier to take working but ugly code and clean it up that to
start from scratch...

Now all they have to do is generate MPW C, and I'll be a happy camper :-).

--
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