NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #19/NN_1992_19.iso/spool/comp/sys/mac/programm/14973

Text File | 1992-09-03 | 1.7 KB | 42 lines

Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Path: sparky!uunet!uunet.ca!geac!alias!news
From: Reid Ellis <[e-mail]>
Subject: Re: Adding Balloon help
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Sender: [e-mail] (News Owner)
Organization: Alias Research, Inc., Toronto ON Canada
References: <[e-mail]> <peter-030992130709@134.7.50.3>
Date: Thu, 3 Sep 1992 18:42:30 GMT
Lines: 30

Danny W. McCampbell <[e-mail]> asked about adding balloon
help to his app.

Peter N Lewis <[e-mail]> replied:
|Whatever you do, don't use BalloonWriter or you'll spend more time
|fighting it than adding balloons!
 ...
|The hdlg resource has items for each dialog item.  There is a hdlg
|item in the array for each DITL item, and each hdlg item has four
|strings (STR# id, index pairs) attached to it (Normal, Disabled,
|Checked, something else).

This is fine as long as your balloon help strings are all less than
255 chars long.  If they're longer, you should use TEXT [HMTEResItem]
resources instead.  Another advantage of using TEXT resources is that
you can used 'styl' resources to style the text with different fonts,
sizes, boldness etc.  This can be a bad thing as well, since any font
selected via Leium or whatever will be ignored.  If you want to get
REALLY fancy, you can use PICT [HMPictItem] resources and have nice
colour diagrams in your explanations.

I've always wondered if you could use a 'moov' resource.  A little
animation would make 3D revolves etc. easier to understand, that's for
sure.

Reid
--
Reid Ellis
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