Article Preview
Buy Now
COLUMN
Windows User Interface
Differences between Mac and Windows
Issue: 6.2 (January/February 2008)
Author: Christian Schmitz
Author Bio: Christian Schmitz is the creator of the Monkeybread Software REALbasic Plugins.
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 6,960
Starting Page Number: 40
Article Number: 6218
Related Link(s): None
Excerpt of article text...
There are differences between the Mac OS X and Windows user interfaces which REALbasic can't handle for your application on its own. This article will point you to a few areas where you can add code to your applications to handle these obstacles.
Windows
If you launch an application on Mac OS X, nothing needs to be visible. The menubar is on the top of the screen and offers commands and no window is needed. On Windows there needs to be a window to have anything visible on screen. This makes a difference in application design.
If you write a text editor, on Windows you are required to always have a window open or quit the application. If the user closes the last window, you need to quit the application. REALbasic does that automatically by closing the application if no more code runs: no timer, no thread, no socket, and no window. So on startup of the application, you show an empty window (NewDocument event) or open a file (OpenDocument event). If the file can't be opened, remember to quit the application after showing an error or run the NewDocument code to show an empty window so the user can access the menu bar.
...End of Excerpt. Please purchase the magazine to read the full article.