Re: cell-select in sequence-dialog-items

[bill@cambridge.apple.com (Bill St. Clair)]

>As much as I like the MCL programming environment, I have to say that
>between the simple-view/view and focusing problems, as well as some serious
>non-modularity (like this);  the various windowing widgets are due for a
>big overhaul.

I have already apologized for the cognitive overload caused by the
simple-view/view stuff.

A lot of the widget problems are due to the fact that MCL uses Mac toolbox controls whenever possible. An advantage of this is that if the standard
appearances of any of these change in the future, MCL will inherit
those changes. The disadvantage is that we also inherit all of their
bugs and can't fix them.

>
>This is not meant as a flame.  The flaws like this have only been found by
>pushing MCL to the limit, but they are there.
>
>PS:  If, perchance, you *do* roll your own sequence-dialog-item, I would
>also recommend that it be a sequence-view (ie subclass of view, not
>dialog-item).  I would also like to see it archived if that would be OK.

We have been considering rewriting table-dialog-items sans Macintosh
list manager for a while. In perfect 20/20 hindsight, this is what I should
have done as part of writing the new Inspector: I ended up doing most
of it but in a non-reuseable manner.

I doubt that anyone here will do a rewrite in the near future, but if
someone else does a reasonable one we'll definitely consider using it
for MCL. At the very least, we'll put it on the next CD. Remember, the
Macintosh list manager has lots of features and MCL's table-dialog-item
uses most of them.