[EXPERIMENTAL] [GOODIE] Menubar for System Windows (was Re: A stupid newbie question)

Nick Brown maillist at bredon-gill.demon.co.uk
Wed Oct 10 00:35:04 UTC 2001


On Tue, 9 Oct 2001 12:33:59 +0200 (CEST), Bert Freudenberg wrote:

[snip]
>Back to Squeak: Has anybody already created some kind of "MorphBar" that
>permanently lists all top-level morphs of a project and allows switching
>between them (bringing it to the top, that is)?
>
>The functionality is already in the "Find Window" menu, so the simplest
>implementation would just pop up that menu from the NavBar. But
>I'd like to have something more accessible ...
>
>-- Bert


Hi Bert and all.
	It sounds like this isn't exactly what you're after, but I
thought I'd lob it in anyway.

Basically its an extention to Jim Benson's MenuBar changeset which
modifies SystemWindow so that each time a window is brought to the
front (by receiving #activate), the window queries its model to see if
the model would like a menu bar to be displayed. Models do this by
implementing #displayMenuBar. This changeset has *very* rough
implementations for the Browser, FileList, and Workspace.

After I'd done this I started thinking about how nice it would be to
have an MS Windows-style "Window" menu, rather than having to
shift-click on the desktop - (I never seem to have enough desktop!)

To try this, you need Menu Bar changeset. I wrote this against the
version posted to the list in about June '01, and I've just tried it
against the newer version (v0.3 according to the preamble) - it seems
to work ok, or at least as ok as it ever worked. There are some bugs
in it, detailed in the UpdatingMenuBarItemMorph class comment. It was
these bugs that halted my work on this, and then I just forgot about
it.

Just file in the menu bar changeset, then this changeset and then pop
open a workspace. A menubar should be added to the top of your world,
with the experimental window menu rightmost. 

WARNING: This is probably not something you'll want to keep in your
image. Also, it's likely to trash any existing menubar you may have.
Proceed with caution.

If anyone more knowledgable than me in the ways of morphic and/or the
menubar can give me some hints as to why the UpdatingMenuBarItemMorph
is misbehaving, I'll try to get it fixed.

More generally, I'd welcome any feedback on whether people think any
of this is useful, and suggestions for how it could be improved. I've
got a few weeks of hacking time (read: unemployment) coming up later
this month, and I might just put any good ideas into practice.

Regards,
Nick Brown
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