while I await my password...

[Richard Gaskin]

J. Landman Gay wrote:
>> Default buttons don't behave like OS X default buttons. They constantly 
>> pulse. What is supposed to happen is that when you click on them they 
>> stop pulsing in the brighter state, and if you roll off them they become 
>> empty, like a non-default button. In  Rev they just continue to pulse.
> 
> Probably a bug. The default button style on OS X was a problem for a 
> while and used considerable CPU cycles. That was fixed, but it sounds 
> like newer OS behavior hasn't been implemented.

 From what I've heard, Apple's API does a great job making it easy to do 
"normal" things, but anything outside the HIG is sometimes a no-man's 
land in their frameworks.

I remember Mark Lucas, lead engineer for SuperCard, telling me about the 
time he attended one of Apple's Code Kitchens for Carbon.  Like Rev, SC 
needs to allow people to put default buttons against any background, not 
just the Apple-sanctioned stripes, and some users may even want to put 
objects over some or all of the button as well, complicating rendering 
even further.

When Mark explained what he was trying to do, the Apple engineer he was 
working with told him, "That's not possible."

That's all you need to tell Mark to prompt him to stay up late to find a 
solution, which he did.  But it wasn't easy, and he told me that when he 
went back to Apple he showed that engineer what he had done and the 
engineer was appropriately impressed. :)

As a user of these high-level tools rather than one who dives down into 
the bowels of the APIs to make them, my appreciation for the difficulty 
of the task of delivering things as simple to use and as flexible as Rev 
and SC is limited.  But even in that limited understanding, my respect 
for what programmers like Mark Lucas, Tuviah Snyder, and Mark Waddingham 
have accomplished, even with the occasional rough edges, is very very high.

So yes, this should be reported as a bug.  But knowing what they're up 
against, I can understand how it got implemented as it was.

Considering how Rev needs to deal with so much of the same stuff as SC, 
and then replicate that effort for all the gotchas on Windows and Linux 
as well, it's a wonder Mark Waddingham ever gets any sleep at all.

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  Managing Editor, revJournal
  _______________________________________________________
  Rev tips, tutorials and more: http://www.revJournal.com