Leaving room for the title bar

[Graham Samuel]

On Sun, 21 Sep 2003 16:35:13 -0500, "Ken Ray" <kray at sonsothunder.com> wrote:
>
>You're not talking to yourself, but I think that most people that wanted
>to use up the full space of the screen have gone the route of hiding the
>menubar and making a "decorations empty" full-screen stack based on the
>screenRect. Or alternately, have opened a window with decorations to a
>smaller-than-screen-size window, and allow the user to maximize it,
>resizing it accordingly.
>
>However, based on your table below, the only thing I'd mention is that
>in Windows you can change the title bar height to anything you like in
>the Display control panel (Appearance Tab (you'll need to click on the
>"Advanced" button in WinXP) and select "Active Title Bar" from the drop
>down menu.
>
>Your settings look like they're correct, but take note that the number
>of pixels for the title bar in Windows does not match the setting in the
>Display control panel. For example, in Win XP, the height is shown as
>"25" in the control panel. You should be able to query
>
>   HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Control Panel/Desktop/WindowMetrics/CaptionHeight
>
>and take the value there and divide it by 15 and get the absoulte value.
>For example, on my PC, the default of 25 pixels is displayed as -375 in
>the CaptionHeight key in the Registry (abs(-375/15) = 25), and when I
>changed it to 35 pixels, the CaptionHeight went to -525 (abs(-525/15) =
>35). You can then take that and add 5 pixels to get the "true" size (30
>for the default in this case).
>

Ken, this info is like gold dust - thanks so much! However I must 
admit I don't know how to do your HKEY query in Transcript - I mean, 
I think you've given me a path, but how do I know the value of 
HKEY_CURRENT_USER? Sorry to be so ignorant, but despite appearances, 
I am also much more Mac- than Windows-based. It's just that I'm 
trying to be as faithfully cross-platform as possible.

On Mon, 22 Sep 2003 09:07:42 +1000, Igor Couto <igor at pixelmedia.com.au> wrote:
>
>I can't speak for others, but I must admit, I haven't come up with this
>problem yet. That is probably because I have never had the need to have
>a windows that takes up the entire screen, and still has decorations in
>it - this must be a 'windows concept', and I am a Mac user... Whenever
>I've had to use a window that takes up the entire screen (such as in a
>kiosk-style multimedia presentation), I always want the decorations
>gone altogether.

Well, I admit I may be unusual in wanting to set both the width and 
the height of the window to fill the available screen space, but the 
idea of making the maximum area available to the user is 
well-established on the Mac and the PC. For example if you open a new 
document in AppleWorks, the height of the doc window is adjusted to 
fill all the space between the toolbar and the bottom of the screen. 
The same goes for MS Word and so on. In theory if you set a doc to 
landscape in one of these apps, it will then use up as much width as 
it can in order to show the whole doc - tho I don't think AppleWorks 
actually does this.

In my case, I don't have an external toolbar and I want to cover as 
much of the screen as possible without using a kiosk effect - this is 
because the user (a child) knows that he/she is using a 'normal' 
computer and expects to see all the usual stuff on the screen 
(including window decorations - particularly a title bar) while at 
the same time not having too many distractions showing up behind the 
app's main window. This particular take on screen real estate is not 
really my idea, it comes from teacher feedback.

>
>It seems to me - perhaps wrongly - that the entire point of the
>decorations is to allow the user to manipulate the window: resize it,
>move it, shrink it, close it, etc. If we are assuming that the user
>will want to do those things with the window, then we must also assume
>that they are going to to this because they want access to other items
>on their desktop - which we should allow them to see... Mac users are
>generally comfortable and used to working with multiple open windows on
>their desktops (and messy desktops and docks, full with tens of icons!).

Yes, but this is a single-task app which the pupil works on in class 
until the exercise is done, so additional windows (apart from 
palettes and so forth belonging to the app itself) are just a 
distraction.

>Only having ever worked *very* occasionally on Windows machines, I
>can't tell whether the same applies to the user-interfaces paradigms
>there. However, I do remember that the 'auto-resize' button in Windows
>windows seemed to automatically resize the window to fit my entire
>screen (which, as a Mac user, I thought was rather odd and annoying).
>If that mechanism is already available in Windows platforms, though,
>then perhaps you don't have to worry about manually implementing it in
>Revolution - if you are only going to deliver on that platform.

Well, I have geometry to worry about! There are a lot of controls in 
the window (stack) and they have to arrange themselves sensibly in 
the available space. I have decided to accommodate the 1024x768, 
800x600 and 640x480 screens (teacher feedback again - personally I 
have not worked on a 640x480 screen on any platform for as long as I 
can remember). All this is 99% working - tho now I have to include 
Ken's new fix!
>.

Anyway thanks for your interest, and I hope I've explained what I'm 
doing without getting boring.

Graham
-- 
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          Graham Samuel / The Living Fossil Co. / UK & France