Maintaining window cascade when window size changes

[Fabian Schuiki]

Thanks Greg!

It took me about a day to find out that those nasty effects that  
appeared if you had child windows with child windows :-D. Looks like  
the WindowServer handles the parent's child window's child window  
well when moving, but if the paren'ts child window's child window has  
a child window too, that last window doesn't get moved. When you're  
dragging the parent window, the child window's -frame method doesn't  
return quite what you'd expect (it returns the frame before starting  
the move).
I look forward to Leopard, hopefully Apple got some of this stuff  
right (they had a plenty of time now).

So thanks again and all the best for you (and propably OmniFocus),
Fabian

Fabian Schuiki
fabianschuiki at bluewin.ch


Am 30.05.2007 um 17:27 schrieb Greg Titus:

>
> On May 29, 2007, at 11:07 AM, Fabian Schuiki wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> Question going to Omni: In your OmniInspector framework, how do  
>> you tell your inspectors to stick together? When an inspector in  
>> the middle of the cascade changes its size, all subsequent  
>> inspectors stick to that inspectors bottom edge. How do you do that?
>
> Manually, for the most part. We register for  
> NSWindowDidResizeNotification for the windows involved, and then  
> when one of them is changed, we reposition every other window below  
> it appropriately. The code is in OIInspectorGroup - 
> controllerWindowDidResize: if you are interested in looking at the  
> code.
>
> I initially attempted to write the code such that each inspector  
> was a child window of the one above it, in the hopes that a lot of  
> these manipulations would be automatically handled by the child  
> window support in the window server, but at least in 10.3 and 10.4,  
> AppKit really doesn't deal well with child windows that themselves  
> have child windows. Just one level of parent and child is all that  
> seems to be supported.
>
> So the only use of child windows now is that when you drag a group  
> of inspectors, the topmost window is a parent and all of the  
> windows under it are child windows of that top parent. This allows  
> the window server to manage the dragging around of groups of  
> windows automatically. But everything else is all done in our code.
>
> Hope this helps,
> 	- Greg