Information as of January 27, 1998 (version 1.0.2)
1. Appearance 1.0 ships with and supports Mac OS version 8.0 only. It should not normally be used with earlier versions of Mac OS.
2. Appearance 1.0.1 ships with Mac OS 8.1.
3. This SDK is the first SDK release for developers of the Appearance Manager. There was no SDK for Appearance version 1.0.
4. Appearance 1.0.2 is designed and tested to work with versions of Mac OS from 7.1 through 8.1.
5. The Appearance Manager consists of two items on a user's hard disk - the Appearance Extension, and the Appearance Control Panel. In addition, an Appearance Preferences file is created if not found by the extension or control panel.
6. There are two variants of the Appearance Control panel in the SDK. The first ("Appearance") is the new file type "APPC", so it will magic-route into the Control Panels folder in Mac OS 8 or later. The other control panel ("AppearanceCDEV") is really an Application, and will not autoroute to the control panels folder. Your installer must ensure that it gets to the control panels folder with the name "Appearance" for English locales.
7. If you plan to bundle Appearance 1.0.2 with your software and install it on System 7.x systems, please use the preferences in the folder "Prefs for use with System 7.x". By doing this, the user will get the Platinum Appearance and Sticky Menu behavior for your Appearance-savvy application, but the rest of their system will continue to look and behave as it always has for them.
8. If you install Appearance 1.0.2 on a System 7.x machine, you should disable (by moving into the disabled folder) the "Color" and "WindowShade" control panels, since the "Appearance" control panel supercedes these. WindowShade is incompatible with the Appearance extension, and interferes with the ability to double-click in the title bar as a way to collapse or expand a window.
9. If your application using Appearance 1.0.2 is installed on a Mac OS 8.0 system which is running Appearance 1.0, you should replace the earlier version with the newer version. Only the extension and control panel should be replaced; the preferences should be left alone.
10. Under Mac OS 8 or later, the extension must be called "Appearance Extension" and can not be renamed. Otherwise, if the user were to shift-boot, the extension would not load, and the Finder would not run, since it hard-links against AppearanceLib.
11. Appearance runs on 68K and PowerPC processors; it supports three run-time models: Classic 68K, CFM-68K, and PowerPC CFM. Color QuickDraw is required for Appearance, so it requires a 68020 or better processor.
12. alrx resources in Appearance 1.0.2
- The "alrx" resources in version 1.0 did not work as advertised. Do not use "alrx" resources in 1.0 If you wish to use "alrx" resources you must run under Appearance 1.0.2. Use only the 1.0.2 format as described in the REZ template supplied in this SDK.
13. The List Box control now turns off drawing on the list it creates. This was done to fix some rather nasty behavioral problems it had. Please be aware of this, as it means that if you manipulate the list directly, you will need to call LSetDrawingMode( true... ) before you draw. You should restore it to false when done.
14. The included article mentions 'wide' hierarchical IDs, i.e. the ability
to use IDs for hierarchical menus that are in the full short integer
range, as opposed to the byte range ( 1-255) you're used to. This did not
make it into Mac OS 8 or the SDK, so please be aware of that. Despite the
fact that we didn't get that in, please make use of the new
SetMenuItemHierarchicalID API and use xmnu resources to specify your
hierarchical IDs. Doing so will set you up for the future when we do get
the wide ID support in.
15. If you are using the Appearance Manager routines to draw Appearance
Savvy MDEFs, there is some late breaking news you need to be aware of to
make this work in the future. To do this correctly, you must respond to a
new MDEF message mIsThemeSavvy (7). Your MDEF will be called with this
message by the menu manager to see whether a theme-savvy background
should be drawn for your menu. To respond properly, return the number
0x7473 in the whichItem parameter to indicate you want a theme-savvy
background. Any other response (or lack thereof), will result in a system
7-style background being drawn. This will sharply contrast with the rest
of the currently theme, most likely, so we urge you to look for this
message. This message is not implemented in the SDK, but IS implemented
in Allegro (Appearance 1.1) . You can prepare yourself now by supporting it
ahead of time.
16: K N O W N B U G S:
16a: Characters in the menu bar when running Painter 5 can be lost (certain characters aren't drawn) when ATM is installed and the Charcoal font is the current system font. Switching to the Chicago font seems to alleviate the problem.
16b: MenuEvent doesn't work with Dvorak keyboards that have Querty command key mappings.
16c: Passing a non-existant Menu ID to a group box with a popup title will crash.
16d: Calling HiliteControl( 254 ) on a group box will not redraw the control. You should always use hilite 255 for this control.
16e: The radio group control is documented to work correctly with Bevel buttons with sticky behavior. This is broken. Radio groups with radio buttons, however, do work correctly.
16f: CountSubControls returns the wrong number of sub-controls for list boxes.
16g: Timbuktu will not connect when the Appearance Extension is installed. Farallon has been notified of the problem and we have given them a solution. The fix will be in a release of Timbuktu following 4.0. The problem is related to the keyboard font present in the extension.
17. Please send any suggestions for improvements for new Toolbox items, or the Appearance SDK, to <mailto:toolbox@apple.com>.
18. Please report all suspected problems with this SDK to <mailto:devsupport@apple.com>.
