jkeiser's mozilla blog

So far in these articles, I have only dipped a toe or two into Aqua's pool. I have covered basic aspects of building an Aqua-compliant application, including the building of photo-illustrative/3D application icons. Now it's time to address other components of our Mac OS X application.

Adhere to File Locations. Make sure that when your users save documents, your application knows where to put them and also gives users flexibility.

Drawers. Similar to Sheets, this is a "child" window that gives users access to items that do not always need to be present. But when do you use a drawer and when do you use a palette?

For my Paint application, I created a series of icons to simulate a rendering algorithm. While the application is performing this CPU-intensive task, you can always see the status of the document by the icon changing in the Dock.

Not quite as entertaining as Shrek, but Dock animation can be an important and useful function in your application. For example, Dock animation is a helpful way to indicate the status of your application.

Drawers. Similar to Sheets, this is a "child" window that gives users access to items that do not always need to be present. But when do you use a drawer and when do you use a palette?

Other examples of these animations might be to show the status of an FTP transfer, the progress of media being digitized, or an updated time signature. And don't forget that users may want to have some control over this, so give them plenty of options, including the ability to turn these functions off.

You Must Promise. To call your mother, to help old ladies cross the road, and to turn your cell phone off at the movies.

Adopt Sheets. I really like the use of Sheets in OS X. The use of Sheets lets me know which window my dialogue belongs to without hijacking my system.

So far in these articles, I have only dipped a toe or two into Aqua's pool. I have covered basic aspects of building an Aqua-compliant application, including the building of photo-illustrative/3D application icons. Now it's time to address other components of our Mac OS X application.