Desk Accessories
System 7.0 no longer employs the Font/DA Mover. Desk accessories are now
represented by icons, and users install desk accessories by dragging their
Menu Items folder. (The System Folder and Its Related Directories
describes the new organization of the System Folder.) From the user's point of view, there is little or no distinction between desk accessories and applications
in System 7.0.
Desk accessories now behave more like applications. When a desk accessory is
open, its name appears in the Application menu. A desk accessory can have its
own About command in the Apple menu, and it can be brought to the foreground
and sent to background independently of other desk accessories.As described in
Icon resources, you can design a family of icons for your desk accessory and
include all the icons used by applications: large, small, black-and-white,
4-bit color, and 8-bit color icons. If you do not provide icon resources, the
Finder displays your desk accessory icon by using a mirror image of the default application icon, as shown in the first figure in
Icon resources.
Users do not even need to store desk accessories in the Apple Menu Items
folder. Instead, users can store them as they store applications-that is,
anywhere in the file system. Users can open desk accessories from the Finder in the same way they open applications: by double-clicking their icons or by
selecting them and choosing Open from the File menu.
In previous versions of system software, the File menu for desk accessories
included two commands, Close and Quit. The user chose Close to close and quit
the active desk accessory. The user chose Quit to quit all desk accessories. In
System 7.0, the Close command closes the active window and the desk accessory
remains open. The Quit command now terminates the active desk accessory
only. Close and Quit have keyboard equivalents of Command-W and
Command-Q, respectively.
Users of previous versions of system software are ac customed to opening
their desk accessories from the Apple menu. Users of System 7.0 can use this
convenient method to open any of their applications. Any application or alias to
an application that users drag to the Apple Menu Items folder appears in the
Apple menu. Choosing a name from the Apple menu, of course, opens the
application.
These similarities in installation, user access, and capability make desk
accessories and applications more consistent in their appearance and behavior.
There are no compelling reasons to create desk accessories for System 7.0.
Instead, if you wish to develop a desk accessory-like tool, it's a better idea to
write a small application, because desk accessories are generally more difficult
to write and less powerful than applications.
You may decide to upgrade your existing desk accessory instead of rewriting it
as an application, or you may wish to write a desk accessory because you want
it to run in previous versions of system software where MultiFinder is optional. If you create a desk accessory, in your documentation you should
instruct users of System 7.0 that if they want the desk accessory to appear in
the Apple menu, they should install it by dragging its icon to the System Folder icon. A dialog box appears asking the user to verify that the desk accessory
should be installed in the Apple Menu Items folder. The user clicks OK to accept
this installation. The user also has the option to click Cancel to prevent the
installation.
Note: If users drag a desk accessory icon to the open System Folder desk accessory into the System Folder directory instead of installing it in the Apple Menu Items directory.
You can also provide a message for your desk accessory that appears in an
alert box when the user chooses the About command from the Apple menu in
System 7.0. To provide this message, create a resource called 'dast' as an owned
resource with a sub ID of 0. For example, the 'dast' resource with a sub ID of 0
for a desk accessory with a 'DRVR' ID of 12 (also called the owner ID in
ResEdit) gets a resource ID of -16000. Your 'dast' resource must contain a
Pascal string only. When the user chooses the About command for your desk
accessory, this string appears in an alert box along with the icon you provide
for your desk accessory.
balloon message for your desk accessory icon that overrides the Finder's default help balloon for desk accessory icons.