Re: [Pythoncard-users] global menubar

[<bra...@om...>]

Hm...my app has a lot of fairly small windows, since it's a database front 
end with a lot of small forms and lists (not 'documents', per se). It 
seems a little odd for each one to have an individual menubar containing 
global navigation features. I guess that pushes me toward the single 
window tabbed interface approach. The sample demo for tabbed interface 
(testNotebook) looks good, but I get the impression that the Notebook for 
PythonCard is still somewhat experimental. Should I expect problems if I 
start using it?

Thanks!



Brad Allen wrote: 
> 
> Hm...I don't see that option on any of my windows under Background 
> Info. I'm using PythonCard .81 with Python 2.3 under Windows XP . I 
> do see a checkbox called "Status bar on Window", but unchecking that
> had no effect that I could see. The menus on my primary parent 
> window are still not available in child windows. 
> 
> To clarify, what I'm trying to accomplish here is an overarching 
> application window which contains other windows. At least, that's 
> what it would look like under Windows. 

Alex Tweedly wrote on 03/19/2005 07:49:39 PM:

> That's (I think, from your description) the old Windows MDI 
> (multiple doc interface) style - a single window, with a menu and 
> one or more "document" windows - such as Adobe Photoshop Elements 
> (though it adds palettes and floating toolbars and other extras). 
> Another example would be old versions of Word, Excel, etc.
> 
> That style has been largely deprecated by MS in favour of either 
> their SDI (Single Doc Interface), such as recent versions of Word, 
> Excel, etc., where each doc window has its own set of menus (and 
> there may also be palettes, etc.), or notebook / tabbed styles.
> 
> There's no direct support for MDI in Pythoncard - though I believe 
> you can achieve it using wxPython directly to create the sub-
> windows. For what it's worth, I'd recommend against this - it really
> is "last decade's" style :-)
> 
> Personally, I think the notebook/tabbed style is the way to go, with
> separate child windows (probably menu-less) for any additional child
> windows which are not "document" windows.
> 
> There is something of a "myth" that MDI is "the Windows way to do 
> it" - resulting from the old version of MS products - but if you 
> look closely at current products (not just from MS), most of them 
> have abandoned that style in favour of one of the other styles.
> On a Mac, it would just be an menubar globally available and 
> applicable independent of which window happened to be active. I'm 
> not clear on how to accomplish this in PythonCard. 
> Sorry, can't say anything about Mac.
> -- 
> Alex Tweedly       http://www.tweedly.net
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