Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!dino!ux1.cso.uiuc.edu!brutus.cs.uiuc.edu!psuvax1!xavier!jackiw From: jackiw@cs.swarthmore.edu (Nick Jackiw) Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer Subject: Movable MDEF from _ModalDialog Summary: Is it unkind, or is it illegal? Message-ID: Date: 2 Mar 90 21:06:30 GMT Sender: news@xavier.swarthmore.edu (USENET News System) Organization: Visual Geometry Project, Swarthmore College, PA Lines: 52 Me again, same topic again, sorry. (You can drag a dead horse to water, but you can't make it sink...) Jim Reekes, in Zen & The Movable Modal Dialog, says that "The movable-modal dialog should NOT be used in the call to _ModalDialog." and lists two reasons: 1) Multifinder can't switch out from ModalDialog. 2) Your filter proc would have to handle updates, activate/deactivate, suspend/resume, drag, zoom etc. There's an obvious contradiction here: if Multifinder won't let you switch, then you're never going to get suspend/resumes, and if your dialog doesn't bring up any other dialogs on top of it, you won't get activate/deactivates either. Empirical testing shows that no, you can't switch from ModalDialog. (Which is strange: I thought you could, provided the windowProc wasn't of the [old] modal dialog variety. Whatever.) Finally, any one who has implemented a dialog which can possibly invoke and dismiss a second dialog has had to handle update events for arbitrary windows from within a filterProc before. No big deal. So the first premise is that (2) is no difficulty at all. There are times and reasons when the (existing) fact that _ModalDialog won't allow multifinder to switch have been put to good use. These reasons may not be quite as extensive as various folks (including most of the Apple reps in this group) tried to make them out last year here when justifying the behaviour of multifinder, but they do exist. SFGetFile is one classic example. So the second premise is that sometimes (not always), we *want* a dialog to keep major context switching from happening. Given these two premises, is there any a priori, implementation- or interface-specific reason we *can't* use WDEF#128 with _ModalDialog? [The zoombox bug was one; but does the fact that it's fixed indicate a commitment to continued _ModalDialog support?] Thanks. -Nick Jackiw k -- -----Nicholas Jackiw [jackiw@cs.swarthmore.edu|jackiw@swarthmr.bitnet]----- "Here is how I built this artificial mine. I snatched a female louse from the hair of humanity. I was seen to lie with her on three successive nights, and then I flung her into the pit." _Maldoror_, Canto II