sane way to keep menubar on mac (and what about windows???)

[Richard Gaskin]

Dr. Hawkins wrote:
 > To reveal my windows side ignorance (yes, I've really never owned
 > a windows box!), just how *does* a windows program present a menu
 > or choices before it has a user window open?   Leave around a
 > gratuities window?

The others here have answered the Mac side well, so all I could add here 
is another recommendation for VirtualBox.

Microsoft explicitly allows you to run any licensed non-OEM version on 
VMs.  (I wish Apple did this, and I understand why they don't, but it 
would be nice.)

So with VirtualBox being free and open, and a Win license being under 
$100, you can have the benefits of a Windows box without ever leaving 
the OS you prefer.

There are some advantages with running Windows on native iron, but with 
the quality of modern VMs those are few for application work like we do 
with LC.


Spending time exploring each of our target OSes is critical for 
delivering designs that will meet our users' expectations.  While it's 
true that all modern GUI OSes have far more in common than they have 
differences, those differences are worth knowing.

Mac, Windows, and Linux each bring a different set of design goals to 
the table, and while each of us may prefer one or the other all them 
bring interesting and useful things to the table.

As for the menubar, Mac is the only one of the three that allows apps to 
stay open with no visible windows.  Even though it's something us 
long-time Mac folks are used to, when I train newcomers this is often a 
source of confusion; it's so easy to just click the Finder's desktop, 
and suddenly File->Open doesn't work the way it did just a moment ago in 
whatever app was open.

With Windows and most Linux desktop environments, menus are present only 
when a window for that app is visible.  Most of them display the menus 
at the top of the window, though recent versions of Ubuntu use a global 
menu bar like Mac (something I'd love to see supported in LiveCode). 
But even in Ubuntu, an app quits when its last window is closed.

Even on Mac, the convention of allowing apps to remain running even with 
no windows present is not consistently followed.  For example, most 
document-centric apps will remain open without any windows open, but 
many utilities, like System Settings, will quit when the window is 
closed, and even some non-utility apps like iTunes as well; QuickTime 
Player seems to decide for itself when it no longer needs to remain 
running, using some algo I haven't been able to discern.

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Systems
  Software Design and Development for the Desktop, Mobile, and the Web
  ____________________________________________________________________
  Ambassador at FourthWorld.com                http://www.FourthWorld.com