Why is Konfabulator "Pretty?"

[Bill Marriott]

Hi Jacqueline,

You wrote,

>> Rev cannot directly support even icons in menus, which has been around 
>> many years.
>
> Rev does support this. What you need to use are stack menus, rather than 
> the simple button menus which are the default.

I tried looking up "stack menu" in the docs. I found:

"You create a stack menu by laying out the menu items as buttons in a stack 
window, then setting the menuName property of a button in another stack to 
the menu stack's name. Clicking the button displays the menu stack as a 
menu. If you use the same stack menu as the menuName of more than one 
button, the menuButton tells you which button the user clicked to display 
the stack menu."

I am not sure I comprehend what that means. You're probably right, I'm too 
casual a user (I've owned Rev for two years but don't use it daily) to know 
about the technique. I've searched on "menu icon" and found nothing in help. 
The help topic "Menus and the menu bar" mentions nothing about icons. Just 
to be clear, I mean the little 16x16 icons to the left of items like New, 
Open, and Save in Word 2003. (Notice they also have the region set aside for 
menus colorized.)

> If you mean that Rev should implement some of your suggested HIG 
> enhancements automatically, then yes, I think you are probably right. 
> However, almost everything you mention can already be done with some 
> scripting.

Oh yes, that is definitely what I mean. Clearly almost anything can be coded 
with enough effort.

>> Consider draggable, dockable tool bars.
>
> Very easily scriptable, and many of us do this routinely. Trap the 
> moveStack message and position your toolbar accordingly. You can do it in 
> 1 or 2 lines of script.

I'm not sure you can create a true dockable toolbar in a couple lines of 
code that works exactly the way it would in a true windows app. I know you 
can create floating palettes, but those are a little different. The kind I 
am talking about have a little "grabber" region on the left, have a row of 
buttons (including some that have a 16x16 icon to the left of a text label) 
that can be re-arranged by the user, automatically "snap" into position at 
the top, left, bottom, and right of the application window, and have a 
built-in arrow that says, "Add or Remove Buttons" which lets the user modify 
what appears in that toolbar.

>> Hyperlinks in text.
>
> Built-in already, very easy. See the commands and functions dealing with 
> "link" -- linkText, primarily.

My rapid-fire list there didn't mean to say that a feature was completely 
unsupported. More that the feature is not really as accessible it could be. 
With hyperlinks, nothing is automatic. You need to set the linktext, then 
you need to set the textstyle, then you need to do something else to give 
you a hand cursor, some business about grouped text, then you need to have a 
linkclicked handler... I'm honestly not really sure of everything needed 
because seaching/filtering for "hyperlink" in the Topics and Dictionary 
sections of the documentation yeilds... nothing. Again, I'm just a casual 
user.

>> Property grids.   Status strips.
>
> Not sure what you mean here.

A property grid is a grid in which down the left you have the name of a 
property, and down the right you have cells which display (and enable edits 
to) the values of those properties. You see them in web editors like 
Dreamweaver. The grid allows for things like popup menus and spinner arrows 
when the list of valid options is constrained.

A status strip is the stuff that shows up at the bottom of a window which 
tells you things like the current page number, whether a web site is secure 
or not, sometimes help text.

Agreed those all could be hand-coded, but why re-invent the wheel?

>> Web browser control.
>
> You can launch a web browser with a URL. Not sure what other control you 
> mean.

A "web browser control" is something like altBrowser, which is not included 
with Rev.

Bill