Tiger weirdness revisited

[Lars Brehmer]

Howdy again!

I have made some progress in understanding the weirdness in Tiger  
with stacks using windowShape.  Maybe someone can use what I've found  
to actually figure this one out.

Some of you may recall this from about 2 days after Tiger was  
released.  Certain windowShapes don't display properly on machines  
running Tiger.  Klaus, Gordy and Sarah have confirmed this and Gordy  
came up with a workaround that was a good start. I've been fooling  
around with this again for the last 2 days and made an interesting  
discovery that might help one of you real pros get to the bottom of  
this.

To recap the problem.  Stacks using a windowShape that has a sort of  
semi-circular protrusion on the bottom get a weird shadow when using  
rev or my standalone running Tiger.  Also a windowShape that is  
nothing more than a rectangle with slightly rounded corners had a  
different strange appearance, but only in some cases.

As Klaus knows, I experimented for hours and found that the rectangle  
with rounded corners displays fine in Tiger, but ONLY if the width of  
the stack is 698 pixels of less (!!?!??!)  Now, I'm no pro, but I  
think I know enough consider  this to be bizarre!  What can the  
significance of 698 pixels possibly be?  Also, Gordy found a  
workaround that I am using - before I had the different window  
background images in a separate stack with all my graphics for button  
icons, etc, and in the stack backgrounds a button with the image as  
its icon, and the windowShape set to the image ID.  These images were  
in most cases png24's with transparency, created in Photoshop  
elements.  Klaus pointed out that windowshape in rev theoretically  
only supports 2 bit masks, so I recreated the exact shapes with black  
gif's, but these didn't work either.  Gordy found that if you have  
both the gif and the png in the stack background and set the shape to  
the gif, it works (almost).

Here's the interesting catch/clue.  I copied my standalone to my  
other machine running Panther - everything fine.  I did a clean  
install of Tiger, copied the app over again and the strangeness was  
back.  Then I installed Runrev  on the machine, restarted and copied  
the app over again and the problem was gone.  So for now the question  
is what is it about Runrev and Tiger that effects a standalone made  
with Runrev even when Runrev is not running?  The first clue to this  
"intertwining" between Rev and Tiger came when I noticed at one point  
that if I booted my machine and opened my standalone, the weirdness  
was there, but if after booting I opend the Stack in the standalone  
package in Rev first, then closed rev and opened the standalone the  
weirdnes was gone! I mean shouldn't a standalone be able to "stand  
alone?"  I certainly can't expect somebody who has Tiger and wants to  
use my app to buy Rev just to get it to display properly, right?  
There is something about the relationship between Rev and Tiger that  
is different from between Rev and Panther and I hope one of you out  
there might just say Ah Hah! Elementary! It's.......

When I first posted this (before lots of experimentation and with  
fewer concrete clues) only Sarah, Gordy and Klaus responded (big  
thanks again!).  By now I hope a lot more of you are using Tiger and  
maybe found some other little problems and found solutions that might  
have some bearing on this one :-)

And one other oddity in Tiger.  When my standalone launches, certain  
stacks  and substacks are opened invisibly while the splash screen is  
visible, and then shown when the splash screen disappears.  This  
always caused some flicker, even using lockScreen,  until I followed  
a suggestion from the list to open the stacks  
"offscreen" (-5000,-5000) and then set the location to somewhere  
onscreen. Worked like a charm with a tiny Tiger-related problem.  The  
first time I lauch my standalone after booting the machine, those  
stacks appear onscreen in the upper left corner and then switch to  
their end locations.  On subsequent launches they show up flicker  
free at their proper locations.  Any ideas on this one?

Otherwise Tiger has been an absolute dream for everything I do ;-)

Cheers again!

Lars