Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!hellgate.utah.edu!cc.utah.edu!kofoid
From: KOFOID@cc.utah.edu
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.hypercard
Subject: Re: Drawing _on_top_of_ HyperCard's window
Message-ID: <49699@cc.utah.edu>
Date: 9 Mar 90 17:26:39 GMT
Lines: 52

Greg --

    About your "evil note": funny you should mention...

    I've been writing a stack which I want to look as much as possible like an
application running under the standard Mac GUI. I'm doing it partly out of
curiosity, partly as the people it's written for know zilch about HyperCard and
don't want to. They want a tool that behaves like the average Mac program
(requiring no manual reading) that works yesterday.

    What I've found is that the entire menu bar can be completely redefined
from an XCMD. You can use all menu items, as long as you kill the normal HC
event loop with the stack scripts

        on doMenu theItem
        end doMenu

        on choose myTool
        end choose


    You use the menus from an idle handler at stack level running a second XCMD
which screens menu events. This is all relatively easy. I will post the code as
soon as it is debugged sufficiently. Please do your own experiments, however,
as I'm working in a vacuum and you may find much better ways to do this. Please
keep in touch.

    If you just want to add a couple of items to existing menus, make sure they
are added to the end of the item list. You can trap them with the appropriate
statements in an "on doMenu" handler. Things will get mysterious if you try to
upset the order of things in the normal list. Apparently, HC deals with its
intrinsic menu items only through the item number, and doesn't look at the menu
definition itself. I'm sure this makes the code more compact and efficient. If
you rename "Copy Card..." to "FooBar", for instance, you will not be able to
use "FooBar" in the handler, as HC will stubbornly insist on sending the "Copy
Card..." command. Things get even stickier if you do item *insertions*. You can
actually end up sending the disabled gray-line separator as a parameter to
doMenu.

    If you decide to redefine the menu bar, do it with an MBAR resource. This
is faster, saves memory, and is very convenient, as you can define several of
them and swap them about quickly.

    In the meantime, I'll try to finish up my little project and post it ASAP.

    By the way, the groans you hear in the background are voices of
HyperCardists thirsting for my blood. This advice is heresy and I expect the
Apple cops to take away my Mac any day now.

    Good luck and cheers,

        Eric.