Re: Development question

From: leon-pg(at)comvision(dot)com
To: Andreas Pflug <pgadmin(at)pse-consulting(dot)de>
Cc: pgadmin-hackers(at)postgresql(dot)org
Subject: Re: Development question
Date: 2005-02-14 15:03:53
Message-ID: ef839b9986f086a26309bcfb4b0cb15a@comvision.com
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Andreas, I understand where you're coming from. The issue arises
because of a fundamental difference in Mac OS vs Windows/Linux window
management. All Mac OS applications are a hybrid of MDI and SDI. I'll
try to explain:

SDI Features
- There's generally no parent window enclosing the document windows

MDI Features
- Every app has a Window menu listing all of the app's open windows.
This, along with the Cmd-` keyboard shortcut, are the two methods for
accessing other windows of your app without clicking directly on them.
- There's only one Dock icon per application, regardless of how many
windows are open

Since pgAdmin is not a wxWidgets MDI app, I don't think that wxWidgets
is going to provide us with the Window menu.
(http://www.wxwidgets.org/manuals/2.5.3/wx_wxmdiparentframe.html) I'm
not familiar enough with wxWidgets to know if it can be made to provide
a Window menu for SDI apps.

pgAdmin seems like it's part of the way towards fitting the OS X model
nicely. As I mentioned before, the work of tracking open frames was
already done for me. A search of the source for "frames" reveals this
code. Building a Window menu based on the frame list shouldn't be hard.
The other related issue is full Cmd-` support.
I am able to Cmd-` from the main window to a query window, but when I
try to Cmd-` back to the main window, I just get a ` in the SQL text
area.

Since there's currently no way to get to completely-covered pgAdmin3
windows without dragging other windows around to uncover them, I'm
using Mac OS X's Expose feature as a workaround. Using the single-app
mode of Expose, I can see all of my open pgAdmin3 windows in a sort of
tiled view. (See the screenshot above F10 at
http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/expose/ if you're not familiar
with this).

Leon

On Feb 14, 2005, at 5:54 AM, Andreas Pflug wrote:

> Leon Miller-Out wrote:
>
>> The Window menu will list all of the open windows and allow the user
>> to switch between them.
>
> This sounds like MDI's window menu, but we're SDI. If there's some
> window/topFrame registration/setup missing to allow the desktop to
> switch between frames, then wxWidgets should do the stuff; it can't be
> up to pgAdmin to manage the windows.
>
> Regards,
> Andreas

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