Vector window shapes and the great mystery of ink effects

[Scott Rossi]

Recently, Richard Gaskin wrote:

> I'm thinking, man, I would love to have rounded corners on resizable
> palettes.

OK, I woke up this morning with an epiphany: inks and groups and all that
funky stuff are unnecessary.  It should be possible to dynamically create a
mask using a simple scaling graphic object and an image for the mask data.

So, while it's not a true solution, the above does allow for a resizable
transparent stack with rounded corners.  Execute the following in your
message box:

  go url "http://www.tactilemedia.com/site_files/downloads/transtack.rev"

The stack contains a couple of resizing controls -- the titlebar button at
the top, and the slider that sets the roundradius of the stack's corners.
This uses every trick I can think of to make the stack render properly, and
while it works, you'll see the issue is one of scale & response.  When
resizing the stack to larger sizes, the creation/application of the bitmap
mask apparently takes a toll on performance, so response slows down.  (Funny
it works better here on Vista than OS X).

But again, if you can live with a stack that "jumps" to any number of preset
sizes of your choosing (using a toggle control, menu option, or similar) the
method used here should be perfectly acceptable.

Regards,

Scott Rossi
Creative Director
Tactile Media, Multimedia & Design