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Review
UndoToolkit
Issue: 1.4 (February/March 2003)
Author: Daniel Howard
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 3,579
Starting Page Number: 9
RBD Number: 1405
Resource File(s): None
Related Link(s): None
Known Limitations: None
Full text of article...
You have created the next big text editor or bookkeeping program and are ready to release it to the public. You send it out to your beta testers, and they swamp you with e-mails telling you that you have forgotten an undo command! What do you do? Luckily for you there is UndoToolkit by Scott Forbes. This set of classes literally makes any user interface action undoable. No more keeping track of every check box click, key press, popup menu change, etc. With this set of classes everything is done for you.
Now, I know that you are thinking that it cannot be that easy to use. Just as there is no such thing as a free lunch, everything easy in programming has a catch, right? Luckily for you, and me, there is no catch. It takes as few as three lines of code to incorporate the entire system into your application. Yes, you read that right, only three lines. Two of those lines are for enabling and disabling the 'Undo' and 'Redo' menu items and the third goes in whichever interface element you are dealing with (be it a checkbox, a slider, a popup menu, etc.). The ease of using these classes really is the highlight of this toolkit. Anyone from a newbie user to a REALbasic expert can use these classes to shave off some time in building their applications.
As the name suggests, this is a set of classes rather than just one class. The fact that UndoToolkit is included as a set of classes has both positive and negative consequences. It is good because you will only use the classes necessary for the interface elements that you need, reducing the size of the built application if you only use one or two. On the other hand it can be a hassle when dealing with many different types of interface elements as your project will have to include many new classes that can tend to get in the way of a clean organization. Also, the application size will grow and grow with each new interface element for which you implement undo/redo behavior.
On the down side, the Toolkit doesn't support styled text in editfields, only plain text. This isn't very useful if you are trying to make a full-featured word processor or text editor (the toolkit is open source, so you can modify it to support styled text). Less important, though perhaps disappointing to some, is that the UndoToolkit is only available for REALbasic 4.5 and above. Besides those two downsides, this Toolkit is pretty darn slick! I'd recommend it to all that are having trouble implementing their own undo and redo methods. Oh, did I mention it was free, too?
In Brief Product UndoToolkit Manufacturer Scott Forbes Price Free System Requirements Mac OS 8.1+, Mac OS X 10.1+, REALbasic 4.5+ Contact Info www.ravenna.com/~forbes/yonk/source Pros Easy to use, Great feature set, Unlimited undo/redo Cons Doesn't work with styled text, Limited documentation Rating (1.0-5.0): 3.2
End of article.
Article copyrighted by REALbasic Developer magazine. All rights reserved.
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