wjs@fred.cs.washington.edu (William Shipley) (03/25/90)
There are a number of nifty classes in the common library that NeXT hasn't documented. Here are two that I'd like to see. (Note that my descriptions and names are based on intelligent guesses, not facts. Obviously, if I knew everything about these classes, I wouldn't post this.) Browser: - Appears in the Workspace, FontPanel, SavePanel, etc. - Works kind of like a matrix, except with a fixed cell type (SelectionCell?), and scrolling handled by the little buttons underneath. Allows multiple columns, headers on columns, radio or list selection. - Workaround: Get the header (.h) file from me (Courtesy Ed Jung), copy the browser out of /usr/lib/NeXT/fontpanel.nib, and paste into your IB project. ColumnCell: - Appears in DigitalLibrary, Mail, Webster, etc. - Is used to display lines of text for the user to select, when the data in the lines must be in columns. For example, in Mail, it's used to keep the From and Summary parts of the message summary nicely lined up. Note that ButtonCell just doesn't cut the mustard here. You can put tabs in your titles, but you can't set the tab stops easily, and there's no easy way to predict how wide your text will be with a proportional font (so you can't pad with spaces). - Workaround: Maybe I can figure out a way to set tabstops. Unfortunately, I'm not even sure if the Text class currently supports them. Sure, there's a "setParaStyle" method, but there's no "getParaStyle". Further, it says that the style is implementation dependent, and they don't tell us what THEY'VE implemented. Weee. Also, there's maybe an ugly way by creating multiple subcells, but that sucks. Or, use a monofont and printf. That also sucks. There are also some things I'd like to do that NeXT has already done, although I doubt they're in the common libraries. The source would be nice. What do they have to lose? Date Display: - Appears in Mail and Preferences. - Neato display of the date. Matrix that allows user to move buttons: - Appears in IB (menus). -william "newsreaders'r'us" shipley