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MacCheckbox
Issue: 1.6 (June/July 2003)
Author: Greg Fiumara
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 4,004
Starting Page Number: 9
Article Number: 1604
Related Web Link(s):
http://www.quantum-meruit.com
Excerpt of article text...
With everything from an implementation of Cocoa's NSToolbar to a new compiler, REALbasic 5 has everything anyone ever wanted, right? Think again. Aside from various bugs, REAL Software has yet to add even some of the simplest things, such as mixed state checkboxes. Over the years, there have been several attempts to implement them through plugins and canvas-based controls. One of the newest undertakings is MacCheckbox 1.0 by Quantum Meruit.
MacCheckbox is a canvas-based control for REALbasic 5. The author notes that some problems will occur if not using version 5. In addition to providing mixed value functionality, MacCheckbox offers a small mode, where in addition to changing the caption of the checkbox to the font and size of the small system font, the actual checkbox becomes proportionate to the caption.
Quantum Meruit claims MacCheckbox is more "Mac-specific" than the REALbasic provided checkbox, yet many of its features only run under Mac OS X, leaving your users who have not made the switch or who use Windows with different interfaces. In addition, the MacCheckbox class does not have a hard coded way of telling which operating system the user is running. As a result, you must use a provided code snippet so unsupported features for a platform do not get called. Furthermore, the MacCheckbox class is encrypted so you will be unable to fix any of these problems yourself nor learn from the code, as is often done with other development tools.
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