Mac OS 8.5 Technote: Part XXXI

Copyright 1998 by Apple Computer, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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Inside the System File (Continued)

Menu Manager

The Menu Manager is the part of the operating system responsible for both drawing the menu bar, and drawing menus and pop-up menus on the screen while the mouse is being held down.
  • Most of the Menu Manager is now implemented in PowerPC code.

  • Support for associating tagged data with menus and menu items (properties) has been added.

  • Menu contents for menus that use the system 'MDEF' are now cached even when is VM on.

  • It is now possible to remove the current application's name from the application menu.

  • Support for disabling icons appearing in menus has been added.

  • The menu bar is now drawn in condensed-style text, and long menu titles are truncated if the screen is too narrow to display the entire menu bar contents.

  • Support for excluding the menu mark column has been added.

  • Support for more than 255 submenus has been added. SetMenuItemHierarchialID can be used to set the full range of menu IDs (-32767 to 32767).

  • Support for enabling and disabling menu items at indexes greater than 31 has been added.

  • Sorting in AppendResMenu was not working as expected in non-English languages. RelString was being called instead of CompareString. AppendResMenu now uses CompareString so sorting now works as expected with non-English languages.

  • Support for showing and hiding the menu bar has been added.

  • New append/insert APIs without meta-character interpretation have been added.

  • The system 'MDEF' now supports all keyboard modifiers and glyphs.

  • Support for setting the font used to draw a menu has been added. Developers should use this new API rather than setting the low-memory globals SysFontFam and SysFontSize.

COMPATIBILITY NOTE
In Mac OS 8.5, the Menu Manager does not attempt to modify the behavior of third-party 'MDEF's for correct colorization. Application vendors including custom 'MDEF's with their products must revise their products to support Appearance.

COMPATIBILITY NOTE
The Menu Manager does not modify the behavior of the Event Manager to force Button to return true while tracking sticky menus. 'MDEF' authors who depend on Button returning false values must modify their products.

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