What to Read (OD PG)

Inside Macintosh: OpenDoc Programmer's Guide /: Preface - About This Book

What to Read
This is the first book to read if you intend to develop a part editor. It contains three parts: overview information, programming instructions, and human interface guidelines.
Part 1, "Basics," contains two chapters that you should read before reading any other parts of the book.

Chapter 1, "Introduction to OpenDoc," provides a high-level overview of OpenDoc, from both the user's and programmer's point of view.
Chapter 2, "Development Overview," briefly presents the OpenDoc class library and gives general strategies for part-editor development.

Part 2, "Programming," consists of nine chapters that describe the OpenDoc programming interface and give detailed programming suggestions. Read the chapters in any order, as you need the specific information they contain.

Chapter 3, "Frames and Facets," describes how your part uses frames and facets to lay itself out correctly, to interact with its containing part, and to embed other parts within itself.
Chapter 4, "Drawing," describes how your part uses canvases, frames, facets, shapes, and transforms to draw and print its contents correctly.
Chapter 5, "User Events," describes how your part responds to user manipulation, including how it activates itself and how it responds to mouse events and other types of user events.
Chapter 6, "Windows and Menus," describes how your part can set up and manipulate the elements of its user interface, such as windows, dialog boxes, controls, and menus.
Chapter 7, "Storage," presents OpenDoc storage concepts and describes how your part stores its data.
Chapter 8, "Data Transfer," describes how your part can use the clipboard, drag and drop, and linking facilities of OpenDoc.
Chapter 9, "Semantic Events and Scripting," describes how your part can use OpenDoc to respond to and send scripting commands.
Chapter 10, "Extending OpenDoc," describes how your part can extend its capabilities through the OpenDoc extension mechanism and how it can use the existing extensions provided with OpenDoc.
Chapter 11, "OpenDoc Runtime Features," describes the general runtime environment within which your part editor executes. It describes how to create and release objects, discusses binding, illustrates the runtime relationships among OpenDoc objects, and describes the OpenDoc document shell, the part of OpenDoc that represents the process in which your part editor runs.

Part 3, "Human Interface Guidelines," consists of three chapters that describe both the visual interface and the interactions your part should provide for users.

Chapter 12, "Basic Interface Elements," describes the recommended appearances for basic interface elements such as icons, pointers, and borders.
Chapter 13, "Guidelines for Part Display," describes how to display your parts, including where to place windows, how to indicate complex selections, when to activate your part, and how to provide multiple views of your part's content.
Chapter 14, "Guidelines for Content Manipulation," describes how to interact with the user to modify the contents of your part, including adding and resizing frames, creating sequenced frames, undoing commands, and transferring data through the clipboard, drag and drop, or linking.

Three appendixes give summary information:

Appendix A, "Embedding Checklist," summarizes the tasks your part must perform to be a container part--that is, to be able to embed other parts within itself.
Appendix B, "HI Checklist," summarizes the considerations to keep in mind during development to make sure that your part presents a correct and consistent user interface.
Appendix C, "Installing OpenDoc Software and Parts," shows how and where to install the results of your development efforts--part editors, stationery documents, extensions, shell plug-ins, and help files--onto the user's machine.

The glossary at the end of this book applies to all of the OpenDoc developer documentation. The glossary includes terms used in the Class Reference and the Cookbook as well as in this book.