tim@hoptoad.uucp (Tim Maroney) (02/27/90)
Sorry, the message I'm responding to scrolled off before I could get to it. (I just got back from a very hairy network contract in the South Bay that's eaten the last six days of my life.) The claim was made that System 7.0's Layer Manager will allow both floating template windows and sub-windows (e.g., headers, footnotes). The first claim is correct; floating palette's in a layer above all other windows should be easy. What I have seen does not give sub-windows as an intrinsic feature, and they are not any easier to implement on top of the Layer Manager than they are on top of the Window Manager. Consider the hilite state of the windows. If each document window lives in a layer of its own, with a layer of sub-windows in front of it, then every document window will always be activated, as it is always the front window in its layer. Whoops. There goes the Mac interface. You can of course handle your own window hiliting if they don't take away the low-level Window Manager calls; this is exactly what you have to do without the Layer Manager if you want sub-windows. I don't see how a layered approach gives any benefits. It is probably harder to rearrange layers than to rearrange windows; in any case, you still have to do what I've been complaining about, re-code the normal event loop handling for things like SelectWindow and DragWindow to something weird. (To say nothing of FrontWindow!) What the Layer Manager gives you in this context is the ability to avoid sub-windows un-activating the owning window. But you still have to deactivate it manually if it's not the front "document window layer". This is if anything a worse mess than before. I don't have extensive documentation on the System 7.0 Layer Manager, and I'd be happy to be proven wrong on this. But I don't think I am. -- Tim Maroney, Mac Software Consultant, sun!hoptoad!tim, tim@toad.com "Every year, thousands of new Randoids join the ranks. Most tend to be either too-rich self-made tycoons or picked-on computer nerds (the romantic, heroic individualism of Rand's novels flatters the former and fuels the latter's revenge fantasies)." -- Bob Mack, SPY, July 1989