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Session 2: Building the Interface
Issue: 1.2 (October/November 2002)
Author: William Leshner
Author Bio: William Leshner has been programming for twenty years and programming Macs for ten. He has spent a good deal of the last several years building REALbasic applications, including the now famous ResPloder.
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 11,088
Starting Page Number: 40
Article Number: 1120
Resource File(s):
1120.zip Updated: 2013-03-11 19:07:56
Related Web Link(s):
http://www.greatsoftware.com/shipit
http://www.greatsoftware.com/files/shipit.sit
Excerpt of article text...
We have been holding a series of staff meetings to design and build an application called ShipIt! from scratch in REALbasic. ShipIt! uses templates to create release documents (such as the readme and user guide) for a software release. In our first meeting we decided that the main ShipIt! window would manage templates and variables. A variable holds one piece of information about a product, such as the product's name or version number. A template represents one release document and is made up of variables and other text. ShipIt! builds a document for each template by substituting the variables in the template with their values.
Getting Started
We will begin our project with one of the stationary files that comes with REALbasic. The Multiple Document stationary automatically creates a new project that has all of the multi-document functionality we will need, including a File menu with working New and Close menu items and a working Window menu. There are a number of project and build settings that we will need to set before we build a final version of ShipIt!. We will cover those settings in a later meeting. Save the project as
shipit.rb
in a convenient place. Be sure to save the project often as we make changes to it.Menus
Open the "Menu" item in ShipIt!'s project window. Change the About menu item under the Apple menu to
About ShipIt!
. The About menu item will appear under the application menu in Mac OS X and under the Apple menu under Mac OS Classic. Note the lack of ellipses. This is intentional and conforms to Apple's Human Interface Guidelines.
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