Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!ames!ucsd!ucsdhub!hp-sdd!hplabs!hp-sde!hpcea!hpausla!jcl
From: jcl@hpausla.HP.COM (Jeff Laing)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: Re: CAPPS' (was:Text editor help)
Message-ID: <2580003@hpausla.HP.COM>
Date: 13 Oct 88 23:41:04 GMT
References: <549@uva.UUCP>
Organization: HP Australian Software Operation
Lines: 46

> borton@uva.UUCP (Chris Borton) writes ...
>
>> jcl@hpausla.HP.COM (Jeff Laing (ME!)) writes ...
>>I have just sent off for a copy of Capps for LSC ....

It just arrived yesterday.  Boy, oh boy, could Australian Software Dealers
learn from the mail orders in the U.S.A.

> I'd like to take this opportunity to espouse the (in my opinions) extremely
> high quality and value of CAPPS' for LSC. ...
>
> ... What is really super, I think, are the two samples that come with it.

What I think, quite frankly, stinks is that the manual which comes with it is
loose leaf and requires a three ring binder.  The LSC manual I have is properly
bound; I presume that 3.0 came with a binder ....

Still, the content looks good and I dont suppose a binder is going to break
the bank.

> MacTutor did have an article doing this a year or two back, but a friend of
> mine claimed it was problematical.

I think a guy named Brian Powell (?) posted an article explaining how to do it
at one stage as well, but it still didnt work when I tried it; I think Apple
must have changed Textedit after he posted because there were hooks that he
didnt hit that he did have to.   ANYWAY, I have Capps' now so it aint a problem

>>.. same argument could be applied to things like MDEF-0 (tearoff windows tend
>>to require changes to the MDEF to allow the draggable image).  MacTutor has
>>published source which shows how .. why not make it a standard NOW???
>
> Since this implementation was approved by Apple Tech, it is a standard in my
> opinion.  Just needs to be distributed widely...

Actually, I wanted to write in about that.  WHY OH WHY didnt they use a 
mechanism THAT IS DOCUMENTED IN INSIDE MACINTOSH for communicating with the
MDEF rather than using the hack of modifying the contents of resources at
runtime.

The mechanism I am referring to is the Application Defined Message.  Apple
explicitly states that messages above 128 are available for application use
and that the standard MDEF will ignore them.  If message 128 passed a handle
to the applications `floating-window-variables', and the MDEF knows not to
use it until it has been supplied, the hack of having the extra resource with
the same id as the MENU would not be required.