Re: AppIcon patch revisited

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On Friday, February 9, 2001, at 03:11 PM, Frederic Stark wrote:

> I don't want to start war, but, to the best of my knowledge, it was not 
> possible to put 
> controls in those windows (they would draw themselves, but would not answer 
> correctly to 
> events. I spent nights trying :-) ) The problem was that the ordering/drag 
> was performed by 
> the window server itself (via postscript routines included un 
> /usr/lib/NeXTstep/windowPackage.ps, so the applications icons did not had any 
> problem 
> beeing moved around when the app was frozen). 

I didn't know that ... it means that (implications in documentation 
notwithstanding) they
actually functioned much like what we have now in GNUstep.

Somehow some apps (fiend and others) worked around these problems somehow ... 
I'd like it
to be easy for GNUstep programmers ... I believe in reproducing the look and 
feel of
GNUstep, not just the OpenStep (or MacOS-X) API.

> I just booted my old laptop for a few checks. In OPENSTEP4.x, the 
> [NSApplication appIcon] 
> API disapeared, along with [NSWindow miniWindow]. The only API left is 
> [NSApplication 
> setApplicationIconImage:] and [NSWindow setMiniwindowImage:]. 
>  
> So, 
>  
> NS[2-3].x: You could get the NSWindow for the mini windows. You could add 
> views to them, but 
> those views would not respond correctly to events. Worked fine for drop, 
> IIRC. 
>  
> OS4.x: You could not even get the mini windows via official API. 

I believe that this was a dumbing down produced by a desire for the system to 
be portable
to Windoze at the time.  My philosophy is that GNUstep should support the best 
of NeXTstep
and MacOS-X, and just try to lose functionality gracefully on platforms where 
it can't be
supported.