In working around the problem of assigning a visual effect to a specified
rect, I discovered something far more interesting:
I decided for the moment to use a second window, opened in palette mode,
with the decorations set to empty. Then I trap the moveStack message in
my mainStack to adjust the loc of the palette - the message is apparently
sent before redraw, so the movement of the palette window is invisible to
the user.
The implication here is that it seems we have a way of implementing
Gain-like "viewer" objects, by just using substacks as undecorated
palettes, so that we can have specific rects in a window which have their
own cards, message path, etc. Of course, this wouldn't work for any
window which can be resizes smaller than the palette window region, since
it would not be able to clip the drawing of that window to match the
mainstack, but aside from this it looks like a wonderful design option.
Before I run off and start redesigning apps to use this "multiple frame"
effect, can anyone think of a downside to this approach? Thus far I've
only tested it on Windows, but there it looks like a great solution to
many design problems where having true windows panes would be a godsend.
- Richard Gaskin
Fourth World
Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web
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