WWDC1997 Session 102

Transcript

Kind: captions Language: en good afternoon welcome to session 102 where you will learn about the evolution of the Mac OS toolbox please welcome part time Jedi Knight full-time technical lead for the toolbox ed Bo's the user experience of Mac OS 8 sets the new standard in ease of use for personal computers this slide in a second so some of them to look and feel we've added the Mac OS 8 you're going to find out just how easy it is to get this look and feel in your applications and take advantage a lot of lots of the new toolbox features that we've actually added so what's new and different in Mac OS 8 well firstly we've added a new manager called the appearance manager this manager actually allows access to patterns and colors to match the current theme currently there's only one theme if you will and that's the Platinum appearance it also allows access for you to use ap is to draw primitives what we call primitive these primitives draw things like placards window headers and group box lines as was and visual separators as well we've really revved the control manager there is a lot of new functionality in the control manager basically now we have supports to do things like control embedding as well as live scrolling the dialog manager has been significantly improved as well it now supports things like theme backgrounds and an approved dialog and alert handling mechanism the window manager we've made some additions they're basically the window manager now has the port for collapsing and some new zoom variants the menu manager has been enhanced as well now we have support for contextual menus as well as extended menu modifiers finally all these features add up to a much richer environment v2 programming so what are the features and benefits to you well the features obviously we have the new grayscale look and we also have much more powerful tool box managers to program with benefits well the biggest benefit is you get to write less code we have a lot of new functionality in here which will make writing a Macintosh application a lot easier and you'll see more of that as we go on we also get to finally improve the consistency of the interface with this version of Mac OS 8 essentially we have a lot of new controls that have previously not existed in the toolbox things like sliders tabs progress bars things that you've probably written before and now we actually supply them and if enough of you actually get out there and start using this stuff users will actually start to see the same elements in all applications and we'll get back to that consistent look and feel that we just have the other thing the other good benefit of the of using the new toolbox features is that it actually sets your application up for themes switchability themes switching you may have seen theme switching in previous WWDC sessions last year the year before essentially a theme is just a visual look that transcends all elements of the user interface by using all the new deaf pots that we provide and all of the new api's that we provide with Mac OS 8 your application will actually take a huge step towards theme switching the pieces that make all this magic happen are in two components the appearance extension and the parents control panel contextual menus are actually held in a separate extension the appearance extension holds all the new controls that I'll be talking about today as well as implementing all the new ap is the control panel is more for the user it allows the user to actually change their system font it also allows them to change their highlight color for text as well as the accent color the accent color is something new and what it does is when you set your accent color it actually affects things like the menu highlighting progress bar colors the sums of indicators and scroll bars things like that it also rolls in the window shade control panel so now all your window collapsing options are in the appearance control panel the most important option in the appearance control panel is system-wide appearance by default in Mac OS 8 all applications automatically receive the grayscale appearance if the user goes into this control panel and turns this checkbox off essentially all applications except the ones that directly adopt the new features will go back to the classic system 7 look so the finder which is a full adopter of all these new appearance widgets will remain in grayscale while everything else goes back into system 7 this is strictly for compatibility only it's not a form of beam switching the appearance manager basically as I said gives you all the colors and patterns that you need to typically draw in things like window headers you can get the correct color for enabled and disabled text you can get the background colors of Windows things like that we also have the primitives I mentioned this earlier we have placards window headers visual separators and future versions will actually have more drawing primitives for you to do basically it will make it a lot easier to write custom deaf props you'll be able to just a draw me a menu background and we'll take care of the work for you or throw me a button background will draw the button background you guys can draw any type of content that you would like on top of them the most important API in this is registered and unregistered parents client this API is the most important API to learn when it comes to adopting appearance just this one call basically tells a system that even when system-wide appearance is off I want to receive grayscale and it does this by automatically mapping def procs going to get to that in one second so like I said this is about probably the easiest and quickest way to migrate your applications to be deemed savvy and appearance savvy and since we have all these new def procs the classic def crocs are now deprecated this is a good visual visual picture of of how def product mapping works i'm redundant essentially we have this mapping layer in the center this mapping layer receives requests for all the classic depth rocks such as w0 if you were to ask for W thousand zero you were to actually get our mapper WF and any call to that we would redirect either to the real W depth the real classics of you depth or the new theme savvy W def if system-wide appearance is on or you register yourself as an appearance client your going to go and through the mapping layer to the new def procs all if you had system-wide appearance off and you didn't had an application that wasn't an adopter you'd go the route to get to the classic def process best thing to do when adopting this stuff is to adopt directly use the new def procs directly which is represented by the line on the right this eliminates all the overhead of going through the compatibility or mapping layer and as I said the classic def box are going to go away so this is what the picture will look like in the future the macula state control manager has a lot of new features these are just a few and we're going to get into them basically in the past CNET messages there are about 12 to give you an idea of just the just give you an idea of the extent of the additions that we've done we've added 14 new messages to do things like you see here controls now have the ability to specify what features they support so we can know if they will accept this particular message controls can now actually receive Idol they can receive keyboard events and handle focus they can actually track themselves your CDF if you're writing a CDF can actually advertise I want to I want to do I want to take care of tracking completely so in tracking child gets called it will just call your CDF and say here you'll deal with it we also have the ability for control to define their backgrounds this is important with embedding controls if you had it let's say you have a tab control and you want to put things like a radio button on top of it if that radial button wants to redraw and it's going to erase itself and wants to raise to this color of the tab which may be different than the color of the background of the window this mechanism allows that to happen and it only works with embedding and basically what it does is it reverses it goes it asks the control manager basically says all right I'm going to right behind this radio button for to go to each parent of that radio button and see if it has a special background instead and this takes care of all the erasing problems that might have otherwise happen data access we have a new abstract mechanism for getting at data controls the new controls support a lot of new types and of data because just because of their nature and we need a nice abstract way to get at that we have that now there's also a mechanism available to get the optimal size of a control what this means is that you can ask the button in a perfect world which size would you be and then we'll come back and tell you I'd be this many pixels wide and this many pixels high and then you can actually do automatic placement of buttons with that there's also a nice high level activation messaging system for controls so that controls can actually receive a real activate event instead of retaining like a last highlight or something crazy like that control embedding is the single most important addition that we put into the toolbox the old Control Manager had some problems and what I mean by that is that if it had one basic assumption and that was controls never overlapped well in the world of tabs group boxes placards and window headers where you actually want to protection on top of those controls you need something to actually handle overlapping previously you had a situation where you could make the drawing order correct but then you wouldn't hit test right or if you wanted to fix the hit testing then you can draw right so it was like this weird little software Heisenberg principle that you had to deal with so this helps us to actually maintain a real hierarchy real high our hierarchy of controls and that helps us to enforce draw ordering and hit testing it also allows you to do really cool things like you can actually act on controls of the group if you have a group box and you want to disable the group box when you just a belief root box all its children will disable and likewise when you enable it all its children will enable do if you move it they'll all move if you hide it they'll all hide this this eliminates a lot of coding on your part in this model there's a route control which contains all the controls in the window this route control is created on demand by the create route control API and it's only on demand so if you don't ask for this API you're going to get the old control manager behaviors we can also do smart automatic embedding basically once you create a control if you were to call new control or get new control it would automatically embed that control into the route pane of the window normally you may not want to do this you wanted to embed it inside a tab or something the ways to get around this is to api's embed control and auto embed control alt embed control is used by the dialogue manager to actually look at the rectangles of controls and look at what's already on dialogue and say alright rich this control will go and it will find the best place for it keyboard focus is something new that we've added you can actually have real keyboard focus on the Mac now this is completely controlled by the control manager it's kind of redundant again you can also advance reverse it clear it whatever you want the things that you'd expect from focus it only works with controls and only while embedding is on if you wanted to do this focus in yourself you could talk to the controls there's actually a new spend control message API you can talk to the controls and manipulate the focus but trust me it's not very fun so just by turning on embedding you can get this behavior for free in future systems we're going to allow for what's called generic focus where any item is focusable so you could tab over to a button press the spacebar and effectively click that button right now the only controls that we have that actually support focus our edit text list boxes and the clock control you're going to see all of these in a little bit one note about this generic focused thing is that focus defaults to the order that you add controls into a window so if you add controls radio run radio 1 radio 2 radio 3 that's the order that they're going to be focused in automatically future systems we're going to have the ability for you to specify a different focusing algorithm getting and setting control data previously let's take the pop up menu button for example the only way to get at the pop-up menu handle of that button was typically to just you create a handle to some data attach it into the control data field of the control and then you publish the interface so it's not very clean and not a good programming practice in general so what we have is we've invented this new concept we call it data access of four controls and it's implemented via two API eyes getting set control data these days B is actually used a new messaging system that we set up some of the new messages and it's responsible for actually moving the data back and forth the API is to set control data and get control data right very similar to Apple events and very similar to me to collection manager each control can specify it can basically name a series of tags that you can basically get at that data which is a let me rephrase that these control specifies a certain number of constants we call them tags for the each for the pieces of data that you wish to get at so they might be tagged for lists but a list handle for a list box or there might be a tag for the edit text the TE handle of an edit text field this basically allows you access to all the good stuff we have a much better font control now previously you were limited to system fonts and window fonts now you can have any font for any control there's no restrictions there's two ways to do this there's set control font style and for dialogue there's a new resource called dftb dialogues on table the dftb is generally paired up with a diddle and as a diddle is read in the DF TV is also read in and fonts information is applied to controls its most useful when you're having betting on in dialogues basically because when you have inventing on dialogues all items are controls and get into that more in a bit we have the concept of these meta font numbers now we have three constants that you can use we have system font small system font and small emphasize system font essentially these are like just thicker than abstract numbers to get out of and to test a specific system defined font family and size in the future when we introduce themes each theme could actually have its own font and small system font and could be switched by using these constants you'll automatically be ready for this and also improves localized ability some of the things that actually add to this richer control manager API are some nice high level API is that didn't exist before we actually have activate and deactivate control of an API instead of setting the control highlights of 0 or 255 you can use these new high level API s instead of dealing with that and also talks to the controls using the new high level activate message and it also deals right it deals correctly with hierarchies of controls so the preferred method now use deactivate and activate control whenever possible some frameworks and some applications like to control the drawing of controls all by themselves because they know best when when things should be drawn previously - the only way to hide and show control with the use the API is hide control and show control now we have a new API called set control visibility this allows you to actually control whether any drawing occurs by basically saying you say set to total visibility to control where they want it visible or not and then draw it this alleviates the need to actually go in and set the control vis field yourself if you're dealing with the hierarchy of controls that's certainly a bad idea this will actually take care of setting up the controller's being visible and all its children automatically drawn control and current port is a very useful API if you're drawing off screen previously you'd have to mess with the control own report of a window or do some other wacky stuff just to make this you know maybe print off-screen and blasted it was pretty tough to do and it didn't always work right all you need to do now is just set your port to where you want the drawing to occur and call draw control and current port will take care of the rest and finally we have live feedback which when combined with scrollbars equals a live scrolling finding on the mac OS so we've been a little busy working out a lot of things to make your lives easier because we care and this slide alone could show you the vast Armada of controls that we've added and rather than me bore you anymore I'm going to bring up the H I lead so the user experience toolbox is right there and his name is Arlo rose so we have been dizzy haven't we we've implemented 20 new controls that if you include all the variants you now have over 150 ways of displaying your information let's see what we've got you can't design a new appearance without fixing up some of your old controls so we've added the ability to put the fault rings on your push buttons our check boxes not only have on and off States now but we have mixed States that we supply and as well as our radio buttons as well to dessert toppings of relaxes our talking it's both as I said we support the live scrolling feature now so make sure you put that in your apps it's pretty darn cool and I think every other OS has it now so we also have done small scroll bars I'll show you those a little bit later and some of the other demos we'll take a look at some of the newer stuff we've had an H I expect four sliders for a long time but I don't think we've ever offered what we haven't ever offered them as a toolbox item but we didn't just we didn't just stop with what we've been telling you guys to do in the past we've added the ability to do them as directional sliders we've given you tick marks built into them and once again live feedback so that if you have an object that can take advantage of live feedback you can use them in the sliders so text we have text fields now as controls text is pretty straightforward as you can see we support tabbing with keyboard focus and such shift tabbing obviously we've got an edit text field we now apply a password field we have filter abilities in the text field so if you type in a bunch of care there's nothing's going to happen until I type the numbers focusing once again can show what the password was and of course tab done to this little guy gate obviously so who would have ever thought that progress indicators would have been something that so many people wanted we implemented progress indicators determinate and determinate pretty straightforward the little asynchronous arrow guy sitting there not much to them huh yeah let's see we've got group boxes ways of displaying your data in your dialog boxes we can we now give you the group box and and separator control let's see our group boxes can have their content controlled by either a check box or a pop up menu and lets you group all the controls into a user pane if you're using the embedding that the Dead was speaking of earlier and that check box would control whether these guys are inactive or active which is kind of nice we also have icon and picture controls so you can display icons and pictures in your dialogues and applications and we have visible nightmare here bevel buttons bevel buttons are what I can only call multifarious they have so much stuff crammed into em it's not even funny we offer three different sizes small medium large they can act as push buttons as these guys do they can act as radio buttons like these little guys down here they can act as checkboxes if you want to do some stuff there there's actually a mixed state of these guys as well which I don't think any of these show off here they can be pop-up menus they can have text on them they can have icons we kind of pictures they can have see icons the text can be justified and it can have an offset so that it can line up with any text you need to line it up with underneath an example of that is the finders view as list here the finder actually uses that justification to line the name field up with the icons underneath and we also support using icons and pictures as as controlled as well we also have two other little or three other google controls spin arrows which have been another one that we've had a spec for but never given you as a control disclosure triangle and an image well which is what do you know displays an image so using these controls will obviously save you development time when creating a new application and if you're revving your existing apps take the time to use these controls so that when you actually do get theme switching and appearance your app will look good and you'll get theme switching for free right and freely it's also extremely easy to do so get on so the dialogue manager is also much cooler we have a bunch of new functionality we have the ability to set theme backgrounds you can have automatic embedding on request and we can also handle moveable modal dialogues for you what a concept so basically you enable all of this stuff via your bit field you can set this bit you can pass this bit field in two ways you can call new from new what am I to do dialogue new features dialog that's backwards on the slide and we have two new resources the DL GX and a lrx resource these resources run in parallel to your dialogue and alert resources respectively the best combination of features to use is generally seen background steam controls and embedding I think that's where you get the most bang for your buck removable alert one note is that when you can actually have a moveable other alert now just by setting one bit and the lrx resource one note is that whenever the system handles moveable modal's for you you should always install a filter proc to get update events for your other windows that are having another in the background one particular difference between this filter proc and any of your others is that this filter proc will actually receive all events destined for your application not just the ones that were previously filtered or given to you by the dialog manager previously another thing that we fix is that whenever you would adopt the new dialogues directly we eliminate a three pixel border that used to exist in the structure region of the window that always looked like the content region of the window and this prevented people from actually running the content up to the edges of the window so that's finally gone if you're going through the compatibility layer the mapping layer by the way that area is still there so your metrics are still untouched some new API so we've added one of them is very important and I think you'll get a lot of mileage out of it standard alert gens alert is a way to actually actually programmatically put an alert up you don't even need to have an alert resource you basically say I want an alert here's the text I want to say and I want you can have up to three buttons and okay cancel and something which defaults to like don't save or something like that you can use has a save dialog you can also specify that a help button appear one interesting feature about it is that it actually will automatically size itself to fit the text that you pass into it and it does that by actually calling the next API auto size dialog given a dialog pointer auto size dialog will actually go out look at the dialog look at its static text and see what will fit and will actually resize the dialogue accordingly movement size dialog item are just for your convenience only basically what they do is they actually force the Control Manager and the dialogue manager to always be in sync what this means is let's say you have a button controlling the dialogue and you move it using move control well if you go to click on that you're not going to get anything because the dialogue manager doesn't know that you moved it using this API these two API will ensure that those rectangles are always in sync jet dialogue atom is controlled is exactly what it says for any item in a dialogue that happens to be a control will just give you the control handle this is pretty important when we come to embedding embedding in dialogues this is this is the quencher when you enable embedding and dialogue all items in your dialogues become controls what this means is that you have a static text item it's going to become one of the new static text controls if you have an edit text item it's going to become one of the new edit text controls and likewise on for pictures icons and whatnot so now get dialogue and in this control is actually really useful because getting dialogue item itself still behaves as it always did so if you ask it for the handle for a static text item you're going to Hamilton text just like you always have but perhaps you want to get the control handle of an edit text item get dialogue NMS control will give you that control handle and then you can actually do something cool like actually disable it but you can never do in the past and if you've ever done it you know the pain it brings said dialog item under this scheme also has a couple of restrictions basically you can set the type or a handle of an item on the fly you can set user item proc pointers and you can't change the able and disable state but you can't go around caging icons into pictures which is kind of bizarre anyways and it would also actually lead to memory leaks with some some in some situations one other caveat and that is that set dialog item text won't update the screen so you'll need to actually call draw one control on it that's only for now we'll fix this in the future but I just want to make you aware of that the window manager has had some additions as well collapsing if you use Aaron you probably have seen the collapse widget well obviously we have one two because I'm wearing so this widget is actually publicly available what I'm talking what I really mean if the API is publicly available so that you can actually programmatically collapse none collapse a window and you look you can also test see whether the window is collapsed so you can do intelligent things like the finder might want to double click on an icon for a folder and the window is shaded it might want to unsaved the window automatically you can do that and you might have a similar application for it we've also separated out the Deaf procs essentially you have we have used MW of 0 which did everything it did SIA you know dialog alerts and document windows now we have two wdesk so we've separated them out why did we do this well basically the great godiva better we have one for dialogues one for document windows but also to free up some variant bits that we need to put some features that we're going to get onto in the next slide we also have two new api's get window region and get window features get window region is useful let's say you want to command click the title of title bar up a window and pop up a menu well you don't really know where the title is well now you can get it using this new API you can also get the location of the collapse box the zoom box that whatever the size box whatever you want Jen window features is a new abstract way to find out what type of a window am I looking at it might be that you want to check the what type of window is up front you might want to see this modal get window features will actually return a bit field and each bit corresponds to a feature and we have features such as it's collapsible its growable its modal it's an alert which is a nice nicer way to deal with it than dealing with variants which is important because variant codes are now different I mean cuz we have new def box with new variant codes and they're all separated and all of that variant codes are different so if you were looking for movable modal D Box proc you might not find what you know you may not end up having the result that you wanted if you're using the new dev box directly if you are again going through the mapping layer everything is still the same so for all new windows or just in general you just start using get window features if possible so some of the variants bits that we freed up allowed us to do some new zoom variants essentially we have a new two new visual different look thing from abhava RINO's which essentially instead of having the standard zoom box that you've seen in the past you can have one with a vertical line the horizontal line arlo is going to show you one of these in a little bit essentially what this does is it gives user a better indication of what's going to happen consider Apple guide the Apple guide window if you were to click the zoom box to collapse down into usually the topic as well as the navigation buttons well that would be a perfect use for a vertical zoom variant because it would visually indicate exactly what which which direction the window was going to go typically the old zoom look is done by the full zoom we call it full zoom now size boxes are now part of the structure region this is important it actually allows you to do a little less work if you're adopting through the compatibility through the mapping lair what we do is we don't we don't actually draw the grow box until you call it called drug roll icon but if you're adapting directly the variant itself always dictates whether or not a grow box will appear so what this means is if you the proc IDs are a lot they're now so if you ask for a document window you're going to get a document window if you ask for a document window with a grow box you will get a document with a little girl box we're going to draw it for you automatically so there's no need to call it grow like on any longer in that situation and you don't also have to do the tricks that you have in the past like clip out so that you don't get the delimiting lines for the scrollbar utility windows also have smaller sized boxes on the Mac OS Tate one adopt directly when adopted directly if you if you go through the mapping layer again same as always but if you dot directly they're 11 by 11 pixels and we actually have read the scroll bars to actually fit in this space and look you know not all ugly and stuff so again let's bring up our low rows who will design for food thanks dead dialogues and windows they'll take a quick look at dialogues in Windows first off let me clear something up one of the most frequently asked questions is why did we reverse the look of dialogues and document windows when we were designing the new look there were two goals to achieve the first was we wanted users or users rather wanted to be able to drag from all four sides of the windows and we wanted visual distinction well modal dialogues typically present you with a message they were designed to look placard like and well of course we just did the opposite with the doctor windows so you could drag around we threw a title bar on top of on top of modal dialogues if they are movable and what am I saying so as you can see we achieve both goals with this design alerts well we did something special with them we added a red tinge and if I try and empty the trash here you will see that there's now a red red border around that when they're movable they're a lot more visually distinct I'll show you that in a minute as well so now your users will will know the con of your alert is an important message so it's a visual distinction between the dialog box when you're making your when you're making sure you're using the new alerts and not using dialogues because a lot of a lot of people actually are using dialogues rather than alerts you might want to consider using the new standard alert call we go back into our little sample app here and bring up standard alert basically as I've said before we give you the ability to pass it an air text message and explanation message you can have up to three buttons if you want you can show a help icon and it can be movable and hit okay and as you can see it just automatically generated all of the stuff this opposing pre-planned at all and you can also see that if you flow a whole bunch of text in here let me show you this one as an example it will automatically science the alert as more text is thrown in this is good for both internationalization and if somebody changes the text strings on you at the last minute we also have a new design for the utility windows that mentioned before open this little guy up we have both the normal utility window that existed here the new small scroll bars it supports the windows shake widget it we also have the side slide side side floating utility window which I don't know if was that ever public before I'm not sure if it was and as you saw a moment ago actually I didn't show you a moment ago here's the new design for the document windows it has a collapse box as well you may remember this collapse box from the Copeland demos or from Aaron which was the author of one of the things we are doing that's a little bit different from the shareware version from what we were planning on doing with Copeland because you can option click the of course it would help us I had a bunch of windows open in this layer you can option click the the collapse box and will window shade them all which is kind of nice and one of the other nice features if I hide the finder and then go back to it they stay shaded and that's a feature that wasn't around before I don't get why people like that feature cool so now so now that I've shown you all this you're probably wondering how hard is it to make a dialog or some of my windows appearance savvy let me get rid of some of these guys here and show you a quick demonstration of Eudora if we do a check mail specially you can see that this this dialog box here it uses the new appearance controls because check boxes and push-button stuff like that obviously they get it that the background is still white and the folks over at Qualcomm are using this black pick as their divider lines well let's quit out of Eudora drag it into a very special guys edit open up the dialog resource or doodle resource now let's go for the dialog leave its 1:56 and let's first set use theme window use theme controlled and use theme background we will make this version of residue off to be pets and polishing touches on it with one of our SDK releases let's open this guy up and let's change it to a control sure let's create this guy we change its ID to 144 which just happens to be the divider line let's set the size of it to be right in there do the same thing for this guy change it to a control open it up create the control set it sighs close it up quit save everything school now when we go into open up your door again and we check them in and allow this connection it is now apparent savvy with all the right controls it is that easy so as you can see it's not that hard to make your app appear in savvy well at least your dialogues that's about all it is right when I was actually tasked with the g-pack of revving date and time to be a parent savvy basically it only took me about two days to make the entire thing appearance aware and one of the beautiful things about it was that I was able to eliminate all but one user item because we actually had the controls provided by the system now so they had user vitamins to do things for like the group boxes then because they had icon sweeps instead of regular icons well now we have control to support all this so it's just basically everything you've ever dreamed of now the menu manager lots of good features there we have a whole slew of new getters and setters to essentially allow you to set things like extended modifiers you can now have command option shift P if you want it's not a problem we could do it we also have command IDs command IDs are very useful for things like frameworks and open dock where you can actually assign a position independent command ID to any menu items so after you receive a successful menu select you could just get the command ID and switch off of that and to reorder your menu items who cares all this extended menu information can actually be supplied in the next mnu resource which runs parallel to your menu resources whenever you call get menu the SMN your resources automatically read in in place of menu key we have a new API called menu event Menu key wasn't very conducive to modifier keys considering that it didn't know anything about modifiers so we have this new event a new API which basically takes a point into an event instead of a key and a modifier field basically you should probably use this right after a call to wait next but then you just pass it in here and find out if it well if with a keyboard event you pass it into menu event and find out if something actually was selected from the menu it's actually possible to have a menu equivalent now that doesn't have a command key necessary for you to hold down for that so it's not always you don't have to actually look for the command key any longer if you want to actually do that you can just look for any modifier key if you get a key down pass it into menu event if you get a nonzero result back you know a menu item was just selected we've also added sticky menus probably we think it's probably the best implementation of sticky menus that ever comes with a Mac and essentially for people who are used to the old classic behavior it still behaves right for people who are maybe used to working on Windows and Macs they can out also get the windows type behavior as well only it's much better you can't turn it off was the question but you won't notice it trust me it perfect the menu manager one little thing I wanted to talk about was that when you're creating menus be a new menu it always uses em Devi's ero because we have a new EM desk M def 63 is what it's numbered you need to actually get the after you create your menu with new with new menu you need to actually go out and get the DES process and stuff it into menu product feel a little messy but I thought you should be aware of it we actually have a set of helper utilities and one of them is called new themed menu is an API and they're called new themed menu which actually does this for you we're going to try to supply all of you with that little helper utility and we're actually going to try to get the latest version of all the appearance stuff downs in the Mac OS a compatibility lab so that you guys can grab the stuff and start playing with it the contextual menu manager is something brand-new with Mac OS 8 essentially it allows you quick access to frequently used commands so let's say you click on the trash you're only going to get to amend you're going to get what you'd expect on the trash like what empty trash so it also allows you to hook up plugins you can write plug-ins for the contextual menu manager to actually do other things like maybe compress files or whatever you can dream up one thing about sexual menu managers is that health and plugin things are always added for you you don't even have to deal with that how easy is it to adopt this stuff very easy very few changes are necessary to adopt contextual menus first is is simple on toolbox in this initialization just calling it contextual menus that's all and your event loop after an event comes through call is show contextual menu click if that returns true you're now kind of obliged to show a contextual menu because the user actually is holding ctrl key down and click they kind of expect to hit in connectional menu especially after working there's a finder for awhile what you should do then is you should provide some sort of visual feedback maybe highlight the item that the user just clicked on just make sure that it's the current selection and then calls detection menu select you can add items to the to the menu that appears by passing in a menu handle when contextual menu select returns it will let you know if something was selected and then you can act on it you should really support plugins and contextual menus it's very easy to do basically you describe the location that the user clicked via an Apple event descriptor and that is enough information to let plug-ins know yes it's text it's a picture or whatever another good idea is to supply coercion handlers so that if maybe they don't know your specific object specifier type but they may know what an FS tech is if you can translate those types please do it helps plugins and makes the experience a lot better so once again patron saint of the three toolbox our low roads will give us a demonstration I should have just put a chair up here I've been coming up so often so menus have pretty darn straightforward putting our Evangelist cord and just said trying to put the windows and stuff in middle of the screen so it shows up better well I can't they're menus there at the top so menus can now have extended modifiers and special glyphs let's switch back into the little sample app here and take a look at the modifiers menu we have command shift you can do whatever you want these are just the examples we also support icon sweets we can also put special glitzen in menu now if you take a look at the finder and move to trash you can't move a hard drive to trash I'll be jiggered if we select a folder into the file menu move to trash has the command Delete key on it as I'd mentioned before and somebody commented on we actually have done a pretty slick implementation of sticky menus if you use your Mac like you have in the past and just click move around select something quickly move through your menus you're going to be pretty much okay if you're just scanning to see what's going on nothing is going to stick I know this is kind of tough for you guys to see because my hand is using the mouse but if you click quickly and this is based on the double clicked I'm set in the general controls panel it'll just stick and if you kind of sit back for a while and you have like a server running or a screen saver that needs to go off and you're pissed because these are going to stay open well they don't after 15 seconds they should just close up and go away hasn't been 15 seconds though there we go so nothing will stop in the background which is pretty nice so the finder the finder is one of the best places to show off some of the contextual menu stuff they did a really good job of implementing some neat things as you can see one of the things you'll probably want to do is make sure that your cursor has some sort of feedback as you can see our little cursor guy here has a little painting menu next to it then we've done some other neat stuff with cursors in the finder as well so you can do some neat stuff in the finder like if you contextual click on the on the desktop you can change the desktop background which is kind of nice if you do it as I'd said on the trash you can empty the trash from there and the other nice thing is that even in an inactive window if you click contextual menus do handle click through and release the finder does and you should implement it it doesn't give team for free so that no matter what you click on you always get some sort of contextual menu happening there so as you've seen in the last three demos the finder takes advantage of almost all the new toolbox features thus making it one of the first appearance savvy apps around it's pretty darn cool [Applause] an interesting note is that the finder like Arlo said is the first truly savvy client of all the new appearance stuff that we've added and in fact we run preliminary tests with with a prototype version of appearance and the finder actually themes which is correctly and all the patterns and colors are right and it's very very cool so let's go through a little checklist what does it take to adopt very easy and it's also scalable you can do this in pieces the first thing you should do is call register appearance client just doing that alone will at least make sure that you're always running in great scale use the new death proc numbers directly whenever possible this will eliminate the overhead of the mapping layer add new dlg X and ALR X's resources to your stuff to make all your dialogues apparent savvy since we have tons of new controls try to replace all your user items with the controls so that usually gets a consistent look and feel across applications enable embedding and dialogue this actually gives you a lot of behavior for free there's one actual new H I guideline that we have and that is when dialogues are going to the background they're supposed to go flat and everything dims out with embedding this is really easy and the dialogue manager actually does this for you you can actually do it yourself just by getting the route control of the window and just disabling that because we have this hierarchy it will disable all the children for you it's really easy finally or next to finally make your alerts movable it's not too hard to do just flip a bit and just attach a filter proc to handle update events and finally support contextual menus they're really cool they're very useful and I think they'll do a lot of good to to customers I just want to go over some metric rules some people may be like well when critical themes comes out what's going to happen to my application is I think is going to get a little Wiggy and truth is no everything should stay correct control metrics do not change there are some rules though and that is that default rings and focus rings are outside of maximum 3 pixels this slide might be a little wrong I think that fall rings may actually be four pixels and that's outset from the control rectangle edit X group box list box frames are actually out set to pixels from the control rectangle and likewise the same thing happens to progress indicators that said control metrics are still the same across all themes but be aware that when themes do come out window metrics can change and the size of the menu bar may even vary so please use a get em bar height it's the right thing to do in the future you'll actually be receiving an apple event whenever themes which occurs and then you can adjust your windows or maybe move stuff on-screen whatever you need to do so that's pretty much it this is like a really really high level overview of this stuff there's a lot of detail in here that I can't really cover in so much in this amount of time read the article that I wrote for Mac tech there's a lot of real great detail information that you like lots of Star Trek references I think you'll think you'll get into it go to the compatibility lab you know check out Mac OS Tate see all the new features see how maybe you can adopt them in your applications and hopefully I'm going to try to get this demo the actual code for this demo down there so that you guys can actually take it with you and play with it and see how all this stuff works and check out section 103 learn about detection menu manage your plugins you'll be glad you did so that's it and I think we're going to do from the QA now are we yes we are we have about 10 minutes for QA I'd like to ask ad to come up here Arlo and also Arnold Gordo the tech lead for user experience you've listened to us now we'll listen to you please go to one of the microphones in the aisles please limit yourself to one question at a time and let's start with this microphone hi yes it's mastering multimedia corporation um this need stuff lovely it's sort of kind of like I'm dreaming about the years and the one problem I still got would scrollbars is that the 16-bit control value is just not enough I've got a list box with a hundred thousand cities in for instance isn't it not enough okay so the question if it's a comment that 15 bits for scroll bar is not a lot right 16 bit control values are way too limiting we know this and we will be fixing it in the future definitely I promise I swear to God I came to Apple to making a like the dream that it could be so ok we are players in designing experienced age ok we'll next question okay my name is Curtis when Isis software I was wondering do you have a strategy for being backwards compatible strategy for being backwards compatible instance if I know of a system 7 we can provide the experience extension but if they start with us with extensions off does that mean our application will not be able to run or should we have alternative controls so this income switch on the bottom so the question is about compatibility and if you Reb your extension I'll repeat this while you work out the microphone issue all if you read your application to use appearance now and then you know you ship it with the appearance extension so it can work on system seven systems if someone starts with extensions off does that mean that your application doesn't work at all if so there isn't you can do that do I mean the terms extension is going to be a chef library you can see if it's not present you can weak link against it and if it's not there you can present a dialog that says you know the current squad not found there are also some - tile that you can check to see if it's present there is the if you people guessed out that can tell what their purity is present or not so in the prologue pure application you can check that to see if you have the right environment because the current extension will be will work back and previous systems you should be able to just depend on it and you know if it's not there just a user that to install it basically but you may also decide to have your boat that's what makes your life more difficult obviously yeah thank you okay next question over here at the center oh don't point oh oh I'm sorry have ID in the center I thought that you guys have a gate control I need a time control and I also want to know what to do with windows that have a black border suzanne black title bar like the desk accessories okay so you need to tighten you like to date control you're requesting a time control and windows with a black border it the clock control actually does support a time as well upgrade again it supports both there's even a live variant so that you can have it ticking in the background and if you have it editable in life you can actually change the system clock you can do a date and time does if you really wanted to okay great as far as the black title bar things what what is it that you really both we have one window in our application which has the black title bar and what happens is that window will have all the old appearances while all the other windows and application get the nice new appearance right so it would be nice if that window with the black title bar also have some modern looking look and feel to it can i what do you use this window for whatever content that you have in it well it's actually it doesn't look like a desk accessory window because we change the the rounding so it looks more like a document window but it has it's supposed to indicate that this window is the main focus point of the application and all other windows are children of that main window and yeah I think what we might want to do in this case is have a custom WF in general we're going to depreciate this project n of a window I mean it's still going to be there you can still use it but it will look the way it does now if you want to have something different you can quite Rhonda be dead for that okay get me and we are just quick know we never actually redesigned that that particular WD uh the what we were thinking about doing though was was just making it automatically default to the document window WD we thought that probably piss a lot of people off so we just left it alone but if anybody wants us to do the document windows which we don't mind doing it we'd love to get rid of that w that okay now over here is documentation and our sample code currently available on any of the monthly mailing CDs it's not available yet the CJ is not final so we're not putting in there yet it is available with the tempo speed so if you download tempo you'll get the documentation the sample code and everything the good there is also a debug version of the trance manager which might be helpful so you can get hold it with the tempo speed and as soon as the SDK is ready design you know to write documentation all that it will be under the microwave 50k as well is it downloadable without getting all of tempo which is gigantic can I get download just on one piece not at this point but we'll look into that we'll see if we can do that or you can also get it at the hands-on lab downstairs okay this mic over here okay I really like the new static inedible dialogue text especially the resizing but am I still going to be tyrannically shackled with 255 character Pascal Springs unfortunately yes thanks could you excuse me you could you could put two text rings in there I'd love to see this dialog with more than 255 characters yeah sorry okay we are here Chris F math works actually this is in reference to the documentation and the header files and libraries that are up on the dev world site there mark is not having been reps it's a three and I was just wondering if there's we have brand new ones we have brand new headers and libraries downstairs and compatibility lab okay because I've had some link yeah we know they were out of sting for a little bit okay thank you thanks currently if you select a menu and hold the mouse down to sort of browse the menu list the windows in the background stop updating there's the new sticky menu option breakfast out of fifth time currently it still stops ball processing like like it did before that's one of the reasons that we have this is a 15 second timeout set anything in the background maybe download will actually get some time after that we don't have a synchronous menu behavior currently we're here since there's talk of 255 character filenames heading our way Jenny plans to reduce the font size for really large window titles in your WTF really Moffat one of the things that we actually want to move towards in the W DEP and we haven't yet but we will in a future system release is actually centered truncation so instead of reducing the size what we'll do is we'll probably do some sort of algorithm while we'll convince the font you know do as much as we can and then just send it truncate it so you can see both the beginning and end of whatever the string is that's what the finder does currently in ListView and we'd like to be in sync with them the other thing is there's a lot of my users know I like Windows with lots of grow boxes in them and I really urge you to make a grow box into the control that will follow whatever the current theme is even though a size box is generally associated window it's quite useful to associate it with anything else within the window they can grow like a list box or multiple list box or multiple views or whatever yeah great minds think alike we we will be providing that in the future and finally there are parents manager templates for resource were available on our website and they'll work in the current version of resource work if I was to ship the appearance manager to run under system76 will it affect the appearance of all the other apps in the finder I found with an earlier version of an alpha that I actually got that behavior that's actually a really good question we actually have it's actually possible to specify that when you install you can actually customize the appearance extension so that only your application is affected if you want and it can default that so that only your application will be in grayscale you won't disturb the user in there and everything like grayscale so we do we do have that ability thank you okay I think we're out of time so thank you very much for coming we have another session about user experience just after this one so their own thanks [Applause] [Music] you