Eclectic Cdef Collection

The eclectic CDEF Collection is a set of 2 freeware CDEFs (control definition functions) written in Pascal, the Celsius CDEF and the Gauss CDEF. CDEF stands for "control definition function": it is a way to define the appearance and the behavior of custom controls. Custom controls may be dials, gauges, sliders, and so on. CDEFs may be used by almost every Macintosh software and by practically every development environment and programming language. The Celsius CDEF implements a thermometer- or barber pole-style progress bar similar to that used by the Finder in the Copy or Find windows. Additional options allows you to honor custom colors stored in 'cctb' resources, to draw the bar always in the active look ignoring deactivations, and finally to display the bar with a 3D-like "inset" effect, as shown in the develop 15 article "Working in the Third Dimension". The Gauss CDEF draws application-specified blocks of text. It can draw simply the control's title, append a numeric value to it or draw a block of text up to 32K set up by the calling application. Optionally the Gauss CDEF can also honor 'cctb' resources, draw the text with the owning windows' text font, size and style, and draw a 3D-like effect (inset or raised). The eclectic CDEF Collection consists of - two CDEFs: the Celsius CDEF and the Gauss CDEF - two 'stubs' to allow source-level debugging of the CDEFs: StubCDEF and JumpCDEF - some utility routines - a demonstration application for the CDEFs