At 6:43 AM -0500 12/7/99, Mark A. Schwenk wrote:
>I noticed a few minor issues after applying all current 2.7alpha updates.
>
>(1) Some of the new preferences have no balloon help:
>	browserShowsPackagePane
>	projectsSentToDisk
>	scrollBarsNarrow
>	scrollBarsOnRight
>	scrollBarsWithoutMenuButton

You can add a new Preference simply by evaluating a do-it of the form:

        Preferences enable: #myNewPref
or
        Preferences disable: #myNewPref

Thereafter, your new preference will show up in Preferences windows.

However, if you want your preference to be accompanied by balloon 
help, you need to provide it -- and this was not done when the above 
five preferences were added.

Because the cumulative help text can get pretty lengthy, there's a 
mechanism in Preferences that allows you to add new help messages 
without needing to edit a monolithic method that contains *all* help 
messages.

This mechanism involves placing a method in Preferences category 
"help" which adds the help messages you need and, in the postscript 
of your change set, placing the following line:

       Preferences initializeHelpMessages.

The #initializeHelpMessages call scans the "help" category of 
Preferences, and executes every argumentless method it finds -- the 
methods there are all expected to participate in initializing the 
help system.

For example, right now there are three methods in the "help" category 
of Preferences, named initHelpMsgsA, initHelpMsgsB, and 
initHelpMsgsC.  Take a look at one of these.  If you wanted to add 
help messages for the undocumented preferences, you could submit a 
new method into this "help" category, perhaps calling it 
"initHelpMsgsD", patterned after the ones already there.



>(2) It appears that some of the preferences are not yet implemented
>	iconicHalos
>	simpleHalos

Yep, this is my doing.  Just checking to see if anyone was paying 
attention.  These are in support of forthcoming enhancements to halos 
which will not make their way into 2.7 but will hopefully come out 
shortly thereafter.

   -- Scott