Tips

  Last Month, I only had one tip. So, this month, I felt obligated to make up for it with three tips—an alltime high. Enjoy!

Tip #1 - Make a Help Menu

  When the Apple Guide (now Help) menu made its debut in System 7.5, it wasn't used by many applications. However, it's caught on quite a bit since then, and many applications, like Netscape, put a whole hord of items in that menu.Wouldn't it be nice if that could be done in RB? Well, it can!

  While creating release note summaries for DR1r4-DR1r35a (check out RBM's new collection page), I stumbled across a particularly interesting note in DR1r23 (released on 11/11/97):

  * Added new NotePlayer control (see new documentation)
  * Added help menu support (create a menu called Help)
  * Added new Resource fork object for accessing resources (see new documentation)

  While the first and last notes seem rather funny now, the middle one is something that most people (including myself) didn't know about. It's fairly self-explanatory. As the screenshot shows, you create a menu called "Help", and put various items in it. Then, put in any appropriate menu handlers and enablers, and your application has commands in the actual Help/Apple Guide menu. Amazing!

Tip #2 - Dragging code onto controls

  RB's code editor definitely supports drag and drop, but so do its controls! At least pushbuttons do, anyway. In my continuing search for features added in DR1 that everyone has forgotten about, I found that you can drag text from the code editor on to a pushbutton! As this nice picture shows, it's quite simple. This feature, believe it or not, has been around since DR1r35a! Even more oddly, it has received absolutely no attention from REAL SW since then. Therefore, it only works for pushbuttons, but it's still pretty neat, and occasionally saves time.

Tip #3 - Exporting Pictures

  One of the new features in DR2 was the ability to add pictures of any type QuickTime suports to your project. In addition to that, a handy-dandy picture exporting function was added that very few people noticed: ExportPicture. It takes one parameter, a picture, and returns a boolean.

  What's so special about it? Well, it handles all of the save dialogs for you, and it lets the user export the picture in five different formats (PICT, BMP, JPEG, PhotoShop (!), and QuickTime Image). Yes, you can export PhotoShop pictures right from RB! You won't be able to use things like layers, but it's still a darned cool feature. If the user clicks OK, the ExportPicture function will return true. Otherwise, it will return false, and you'll know that the picture hasn't been saved.