You could paste in the NSUIElement key listed above, but why bother. Not only do you have to poke around the resource fork and
enter some text, you also have to edit the hex code of that character between the two lines in the previoes XML code to chr(13).
That's too much of a pain for lazy programmers... especially when you want to debug a background application, where
you might have to repeat this resource process dozens of times. To make life simple, let's create a tool to do the job for us.
Build the Project
This project is super simple to build. Launch REALbasic and use the default Window1 in the new project.
To the window's Open event, add this one line of code:
me.acceptFileDrop "any"
Then, in the DropObject event of Window1, add this code:
That's it! Build the application and run it. Now, whenever you drag a REALbasic-made OS X application into the window,
it will instantly transform into a background application. When you create a background application,
don't forget to give yourself a way to quit it, since the menubar won't be available.
Conclusion
As usual, you can download the code for this week's project. See you next week!
4-30-03
REALbasic News
by Erick Tejkowsi
StandardAlert and ResizeWidget
Charles Yeomans has posted new versions of StandardAlert and ResizeWidget.
StandardAlert is a free, open-source class that allows you to display standard system alerts.
StandardAlert 1.7 now works on all Rb-supported platforms, thanks to Paul Lefebvre,
who supplied the Windows code. It now displays correctly in MacOS X when either the message
or explanation property is left blank.
ResizeWidget is a cross-platform RB control that allows users to drag-resize controls in a window.
ResizeWidget uses control binding, a REALbasic visual programming feature,
to make using it as easy as possible for developers.
Virtual Volume Manager
Oxalyn Software has announced version 1.0.4 of Virtual Volume Manager.
Targeted to the REALbasic developer, Virtual Volume
Manager streamlines the process of creating, maintaining, and optimizing a
Virtual Volume, providing a Finder-like interface for browsing and an
optimize function to eliminate wasted space. Virtual Volume Manager is $15
for Mac OS X and Mac OS 8.6 and up.
Calendar Class
Norman Palardy has posted Calendar Class.
Calendar Class is a canvas based sub class that implements a calendar.
It lets you :
- change the "start of week day" to any day of the week (day hilighting and coloring is retained even when changing the weeks start day)
- hilight the selected day in any color
- hilight any day in any color
- retain the day hilights even when you change the start day of the calendar (it only discards these when you switch month and year)
- has a "toString" method so you can easily get a text calendar from it
- use any background picture you want (this is a canvas based subclass)
Image Info RB 1.0.4 Release
Kanzu Utilities has released Image Info RB 1.0.4, a REALBasic class for
developers whose wish to retrieve information about images.
Version 1.0.4 is an update for compatibility with REALbasic 5.0
Developers can use Image Info RB in their applications to retrieve almost
any known property of an image including its dimensions, color mode, layers,
channels, clipping paths, fonts, quality, eps halftone screen, and EXIF and
IPTC info.
More than 20 image file formats are supported, including EPS, TIFF,
Photoshop and JPEG and JPEG2000.
OverlayWindow
A novel REALbasic Plugin for RB4.x-OSX and higher,
OverlayWindow is the
first release of the plugin and implements a single method that animates a
"poof". You know "poof" when you remove an icon from the dock.
4-23-03
REALbasic News
by Erick Tejkowsi
Frequency for Mac OS 9
Brad Rhine released a new utility for sending content updates to Blogger websites.
Frequency reduces the time it takes to update users' Blogger websites by eliminating
the need log into Blogger's web-based update system. This is the first version to support Mac OS 9.
SceneBench
SceneBench is a 3D scene editing and model viewing utility for Macintosh. It
has extensive support for mouse-based, "live" direct manipulation -- you can
drag and drop not only the elements of your scene, but also most aspects of
the REALbasic 3D API, while you watch the effects in real time.
The latest pre-release version is available for free.
PlugIn Serial Coder
Plugin Serial Coder is a tool to protect the REALbasic plugin licences that you've paid good money for
by encoding them to make it harder [hopefully impossible] to crack* the plugin registration details
out of your built applications. Currently Plugin Serial Coder will encode for Valentina & MBS Plugin.
PlugIn Serial Coder has been released under the GNU GPL & available from:
ResizeWidget 1.3
ResizeWidget 1.3 is now available from Quantum Meruit.
ResizeWidget is a cross-platform RB control that allows users to drag-resize controls in a window.
ResizeWidget uses control binding, a REALbasic visual programming feature, to make using it as easy as possible for developers.
SelectableStaticText
Owen Yamauchi has posted an update to his
SelectableStaticText.
SelectableStaticText is a Canvas subclass that simulates a control unavailable to REALbasic on Mac OS X.
It looks like a StaticText, but it has selection capabilities similar to those of an EditField.
It allows text dragging, it can resize itself to the optimal height and width to contain the text, and it is cross-platform.
ResourceAccesor
Brady from The La Jolla Underground had just finished adding data fork based resource files and bundle resource editing
to ResFool when he thought that he would share the code that
he uses to access this data.
It is a collection of Free REALbasic classes that implement a ResourceAcesor API.
It's similar, but not identical to, the built-in resource fork class.
It allows you to access resources in the resource fork, resources in a data fork resource file or resources
stored as individual files in a bundle in the same way. You can even get access to your main bundle
(if you are bundled) which provides access to the individual localized and non-localized files,
as well as any resources stored in data fork resource files (must be named .rsrc).
There is also a good amount for CoreFoundation code wrapped in classes that may be of interest (CFURL, CFBundle, CFString, etc).
No plugins required - all the code is written in Native Rb using declares.
Bible Reader Free
Hiddenfield Software announced the first pre-release of their newest software, Bible Reader Free.
Bible Reader Free is a free Bible viewing application for Mac OS X, giving access to multiple books/chapters at the same time. Features include the ability to search for words across all or select parts of the Bible, and apply 'swaps' automatically (where one word can be changed for another - like 'you' for 'thee').
Two translations are currently provided (King James and Basic Bible English), with more to come.
Bible Reader Free is, as its name says, free software.
Boot Panels
