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Feature

Pop-up Palettes

Learn to create a pop-up color selection palette

Issue: 2.5 (May/June 2004)
Author: Thomas Reed
Author Bio: Thomas Reed has been programming as a hobbyist for more than 20 years, and fell in love with the Mac in 1984.
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 9,529
Starting Page Number: 30
RBD Number: 2514
Resource File(s):

2514.sit Updated: Friday, May 14, 2004 at 10:00 AM

Related Link(s): None
Known Limitations: None

Excerpt of article text...

A pop-up palette is similar to a pop-up menu, and usually consists of a grid of graphical items from which the user can select. Such palettes have been found in many applications over the years. One popular example is a palette of paint tool options that appears when you click a tool in a paint program. I have seen many different implementations of the pop-up palette in REALbasic, but many fall short of expectations. In this article, I will show you how to create a very dynamic palette.
Some approaches to the pop-up palette draw the palette within a control in the window containing the initiating control. This approach has a number of serious limitations, with control order issues, handling of clicks outside the palette, and available window space being the most significant. For these reasons, I prefer to implement pop-up palettes as a separate window.
Let's think for a moment about how the palette should look and behave. Although I recommended creating the palette as a window, it is immediately obvious that the palette should not have a title bar. A floating palette with a title bar is a perfectly acceptable object, but that is not what we are trying to achieve. Thus, we must set the window's frame to type "4 - Plain Box". This eliminates as much of the window's interface as possible, with the only part of the window outside the content region being a one pixel wide black line around the edge.

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