ViewEdit Users Guide Draft 1

MacApp 2.0 ViewEdit User's Guide ViewEdit User's Guide preliminary draft 1 •WARNING• This is the first alpha release of ViewEdit. It is untested and not yet beta quality. It should be used with extreme caution: it may crash your system or even erase files from your hard disk. Save your work often and don't use ViewEdit when a system crash would cause you to lose data. Preface Welcome to the ViewEdit User's Guide, and to the power of ViewEdit. ViewEdit is a MacApp utility program that allows you to create view hierarchies in a what-you-see-is-what-you-get editing environment, rather than in a compiled resource file. ViewEdit gives you as much view-editing power as Rez but provides Commando-like dialogs for entering values into each 'view' resource field. This relieves you of having to remember which fields and values are associated with which 'view' types. ViewEdit also allows you to draw, resize, and move your views using the standard Macintosh interface. It even creates and rearranges your view hierarchies as you go! Before you read this document, you should understand these concepts: • View hierarchies. These are introduced in the "Architecture" section of Chapter 4 of the MacApp 2.x Manual (Interim Version). · • View classes. These are described in the MacApp® 2.0BS Display Architecture Release Notes. • View resources. These are explained in the "Creating View Templates" recipe in Chapter 7, "The CookBook", in the MacApp 2.x Manual (Interim Version). This guide is divided into two parts: a step-by-step tutorial and a command reference. ViewEdit is simple enough to use that you may find you won't need to refer to this manual frequently. However, you should read through this manual at least once, for there are many shortcuts and features hidden in ViewEdit, as well as a few eccentricities. 1 © 1988 Apple Computer August 31, 1988 MacApp 2.0 ViewEdit User's Guide A first look at ViewEdit This section shows you how to use ViewEdit to edit the view resources in the DemoDialogs sample application. Before you begin this tutorial, you should build the DemoDialogs sample. If you are new to MacApp and the l\.1PW environment. Chapter 6, of the MacApp 2.x Manual (Interim Version), "How to Install and Use MacApp", will show you how to build the sample applications. After building DemoDialogs, open the VicwEdit application by double-clicking on its icon. The resource file window The first thing that you will see after starting ViewEdit is the empty "Untitled-I" window. Close this window and choose the Open command from the File menu. Then select the DemoDialogs application from the Standard File dialog. The window that appears is reminiscent of the resource file window in ResEdit There is an icon for each type of resource in DemoDialogs. The icon for 'view' resources is always in the upper-left hand comer (and if you have a color screen, you will see it is also the only colored icon). Here is the resource file window from DemoDialogs: DemoDialogs…