Editor's Notes

Mary Elaine Califf

In This issue

Those of you who still haven't made up your minds about Ad Lib will want to start with Jeff Barbose's review. Jeff doesn't pull any punches, but he also says Ad Lib is the best thing going. For details, see page 20.

Those awaiting Jeff Alger's review of Component Workshop will have to wait a little longer. At the request of Component Software, Jeff Alger's followup to his July review has been postponed until the January issue of FrameWorks. Component Software is still shaking the bugs out, and it was agreed all around that a review in time for this issue would have been premature. Instead, Jeff has submitted an article on memory management that follows up on the MACAPP3TECH$ discussion earlier this year. Jeff shows us how to take control of our lives and avoid the Memory Manager. You'll want to take note of the call for action at the end of the article.

We have several other technical articles of interest in this issue. Do not skip Brian Arnold's article on desktop tracking just because the example is in Object Pascal/MacApp 2. Brian presents a fairly complete solution to the problem of tracking across multiple views, complete with auto-scrolling, and much of the work should be transferable to MacApp 3.

Last issue we had articles on behaviors and on QuickTime. This issue, Lou Infeld shows how to use a behavior to add some QuickTime capabilities to applications.

Rounding out the technical articles, Bob Krause describes the use of NeoAccess to manage the problems of persistence in object-oriented applications, and Gary Odom compares the various C-based object-oriented development systems.

Our Tricks of the Trade feature is back this issue with a tip from Karl Goiser on how to modify MABuild to improve turnaround times.

In association news, Howard Oakley reports on a group in the OODL sig who are working on an OODL application framework and we have reports on meetings from WAMADAand NEMADA.

NEW Feature

Have you ever looked for something in the MacApp documentation that just had to be there, but wasn't? Let me rephrase that. After having figured it out yourself, would you like to write an article about it? FrameWorks seems like an excellent place to collect a "cookbook" of how to handle common problems that aren't covered in the documentation provided by Apple. Short items (like checking the fClickCount field of the TToolboxEvent to handle double-clicking) would be collected and published in a single article. More complex issues like saving documents into multiple files and handling multiple document types in an application would appear as regular articles.

In future issues

Watch your mailbox. Articles coming up in future issues include reviews of NeoAccess, Component Workshop, and ObjectMaster, and technical articles on handling menu bars in windows, Prograph, object-oriented analysis and design. We will also keep you up-to-date with Bedrock as we receive information

Our March issue will be devoted to coverage of the February MADA conference. Besides an overview of the conference, we will have articles based on selected presentations. The following issue will probably focus on Bedrock, though other topics will be welcome as space permits.

Authors and Contributing Editors

This issue we're pleased to announce the addition of two new contributing editors: G. Gordon Apple and Kent Sandvik. I'm sure both names are familiar to you as regular contributors to FrameWorks. If you're interested in writing for FrameWorks, please contact me at one of the email addresses listed above.