On Wed, 28 Jul 1999, Richard Gaskin wrote:
> 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.
Here's a wrinkle for you: "plain" style windows on MacOS always have a
single-pixel black border around them. There's no way to turn it off.
Oh, and neither KDE nor Gnome honor an application's request to not
have a border like the Motif window manager does (yes, those WMs are
broken, and no, apparently these problems are not going to get fixed
because as is standard behavior in the Linux community, the developers
don't really give a damn about bugs unless you're willing to fix them
yourself and send them the patch, something we don't have time for).
If these limitations don't bother you, have at it.
Regards,
Scott
> - Richard Gaskin
> Fourth World
> Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web
> _____________________________________________________________________
> [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com
> US: 800-288-5825 Int'l: 323-225-3717 Fax: 323-225-0716
>
>
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Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com
MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that...
