The Document Menu

The Document menu contains commands affecting windows and the files they display as a whole.  The title of this menu (the second command in the main menu) should indicate the kind of thing that the Open command opens and the Save command saves.  It might be ªDocument,º Projectº, ªFileº (for Interface Builder), ªModelº (for spreadsheets), ªGameº (for games), or ªShellº (for Shell).  Applications that don't open or save documents of some kind and don't have a New command won't have this menu.

Because the 2.0 interface includes a Windows menu, the Document menu should never be called ªWindowº as it was in 1.0.

Command 	Action
Open...  	Brings up the Open panel so the user can open a file.  Opening a file also opens a window to display it in. 

New 	Opens a new, untitled file and a window to display it in.

Save 	Saves changes to a file (writes them to the disk).  If the file is untitled, this command should have the same effect as the Save As command.

Save As...  	Saves the file displayed in the window by writing it to a new file with a name supplied by the user.  The new file becomes the file displayed in the window, and the window's title is changed accordingly.  This command places the Save Panel on-screen which asks the user to type in a file name, or cancel the command.  

Save To...  	Saves the file displayed in the window by writing it to a new file with a name supplied by the user.  In this respect, Save To is identical to the Save As command.  However, Save To doesn't replace the window's current file with the new one.  You can choose whether to implement Save As or Save To or both in your application.

Revert to Saved		Replaces the current version of the file displayed in the window with the version saved on disk.  This undoes any changes made to the file since it was last saved.

Close 	Closes the document in the current main window, and all the windows used to display that document. 

In some applications, the user can open documents that are displayed in more than one window.  For these applications, the Close command should be a counterpart to the Open command:  It should close the document file and all the windows that display it.  The Windows menu includes another command, Close Window, that closes a single window (if it has a close button).  Close Window, rather than Close, has the Command-w keyboard alternative. 

If an application uses more than one window to display a document, it could add a Miniaturize command to ªminiaturizeº all the windows associated with the currently selected document (i.e, the document of the key window) into a single miniwindow.  See Interface Builder for an example.