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Issue 9.3

FEATURE

A Document In Tabs

Introducing the tabbed document interface

Issue: 9.3 (March/April 2011)
Author: JC Cruz
Author Bio: JC is a freelance engineering writer from North Vancouver, British Columbia. He frequently contributes articles to MacTech and REALbasic Developer. He also wrote for the now defunct Python Magazine, and is now working on a database e-book. Away from the writing pile, JC spends quality time with his foster nephew, as a proper uncle should. He can be reached at anarakisware-at-gmail-dot-com.
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 45,565
Starting Page Number: 44
Article Number: 9309
Resource File(s):

Download Icon 9309project.zip Updated: 2011-03-02 12:17:08

Related Web Link(s):

http://docs.realsoftware.com/index.php/ContainerControl
http://docs.realsoftware.com/index.php/Window
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_document_interface

Excerpt of article text...

We return again to face the challenge of designing a document-oriented application. This time, we take a look at the tabbed document interface, made popular by Safari and now a standard fixture of many web browsers. We will study three REALbasic classes with which to create said interface. Later, we will build a basic text editor that makes use of a tabbed interface.

A Pile of Documents

Now some users need to work with multiple data sets at the same time. Often, these sets are of the same type, and thus can be treated in the same way. On the other hand, each set stands as a separate entity. Changes and actions made by a user on one set do not affect the other sets.

Software products that provide this service are said to have a document-oriented design (Figure 1). Each data set is a document, often loaded from an external file. The set that gets the user's immediate attention is the active document. Those that do not are considered inactive. A product feature may affect only the active document, or it may affect all visible documents.

The design paradigm

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