Re: gnustep compared to other toolkits

[Michael Hanni]

Howdy,

On 21 Jun 2001 17:57:12 +0100, Nicola Pero wrote:
> 
> Attaching menus to windows is a bit of a problem, because in openstep an
> application has a menu, rather than a window having a menu (like in MS
> Windows).  I suppose a theme wanting to have menus attached to windows
> would have to enlarge all decorated windows by some space (that would
> appear in the API to user apps as if it was space used by the window
> manager) and draw the same main application menu in that space on all
> decorated windows.  The main problem in implementing such an option is
> making sure we are not breaking the API, but to me it looks like possible.
> 
> Implementing such an option is not necessarily strictly bound to themes.

When I did the first (maybe second?) rewrite of NSMenu to include
NSMenuView and the MacOSX API I gave a lot of thought to how this could
be achieved. Obviously people at NeXT/Apple made this happen with
respect to the YellowBox for Windows. I think in that case it was
overcome by having a different menuRepresentation object. Of course, to
get the NeXTish menu we had to bastardize NSMenu and NSMenuView, heh. At
the time I thought it would be possible to have a menubar a'la MacOS as
an NSInterface option (this was also the time I added the WindowMaker
menu style, GSWindowMakerInterfaceStyle). Alas, I ran out of time and
did not attempt this. However, if someone worked on the menubar idea it
might be transformable to a per-window menu. Why you would like this I
do not know, but variety is the spice of life, no? :-)

[looking at NSMenu.h on MacOSX I see this: "// These methods are
platform specific.  They really make little sense on Windows.  Their use
is discouraged." for methods like attachedMenu and isAttached.]

Speaking of NSMenu... is it just me or has it slowed down quite
drastically? Moving up and down a menu with the mouse, I can see the
submenus window come up before the interior is drawn. I do not remember
this being the case some time ago...

Cheers,

  Michael