bills@XAIT.Xerox.COM (Bill Stackhouse) (06/14/90)
I have just sent a new version of Dialogs (2.0) to info-mac which means
it will be in the Sumex-Aim archive in several weeks. The following is
a description of what Dialogs is and does.
Bill Stackhouse
bills@XAIT.Xerox.COM
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Dialog - A Very-High Level Dialog Manager
Version 2.0 6/15/90
Dialog is a series of objects and methods to manage a dialog. In addition to
simple dialog items such as buttons, radio items, and check boxes, support is
provided for the following:
- Drawing the bold oval around the default button.
- Groups of radio items, boxed with titles at top or on side of group.
- PopUp Menus.
- Adjusting PopUp Menus to align with StaticText or EditText items.
- Copying a selected item from a PopUp menu to an EditText item.
- Adjusting List Items to exactly display a given number of items.
- Items in a scrolling list.
- Keyboard equivalents for any radio item, check box, or button.
- Change the cursor over to an I-Beam when over EditText items.
- Managing update events when dialogs or windows overlap the dialog.
- Related check and text items with the display of the text item
dependent on the state of the check item.
- Nested dialogs.
- Visually secure fields with optional support for the clipboard.
- Use of the Clear key.
- User Items.
- User defined behavior when clicking on an item.
- User defined validation for text edit items.
Complex dialogs can be displayed and information retrieved from them with
a few simple lines of source code. While Dialog uses Object-Oriented
techniques in its' implementation, the interface is a simple and can be used
in any existing program without even modifying the event loop.
Dialog is written using Think's Pascal 2.0/3.0 and contains about 3500 lines of
code which compiles into between 4K and 17K bytes of code. The size of the
code depends on which Dialog features are selected using compile time options.
The complete source files are included. Also included is a sample program
(source, project, and resource). It will also compile using MPW Pascal.
Dialogs is shareware and may be used in other software without royalty as
long as credit is given. I will attempt to answer questions and accept bug
reports by either E-Mail or US Mail. The shareware fee is $35
My thanks to Kees de Ridder, Amsterdam, the Netherlands for changes introduced
in version 1.1 including porting to MPW Pascal, bug fixes, and a few features.
Also thanks to David Palmer, palmer@gap.cco.caltech.edu for the idea of
EditText validation.
--
Bill Stackhouse
Cambridge, MA.
bills@XAIT.Xerox.COM