Enhanced User Interface
The user interface for system 7.0 contains noticeable improvements, such as
support for movable modal dialog boxes, and several new features. The Apple
menu can now contain applications, documents, folders, or other Finder objects.
You can supply small icons that the Finder displays in the Apple menu for your
application and documents created by your application. Names of open
applications now appear in the Application menu, a new menu to the right of all
other menus. The Finder displays the small icon for your application in the
right side of the menu bar whenever your application is active.
The structure of the System Folder has changed, including the addition of new
folders that reside inside the System Folder. You can now store p reference
files in the P references folder and temporary files in the Temporary Items
folder.
The Control Panels folder, which is inside the System Folder, replaces the
Control Panel desk accessory. Control panels now appear as individual
documents in the Control Panels folder. The user can open the Control Panels
folder from the Finder or the Apple menu. In addition, if you develop video
cards, you can create an Options dialog box that is used with the Monitors
control panel.
In version 7.0, fonts, desk accessories, keyboards, international resource
collections, and sounds are represented as icons on the desktop. The user
installs fonts and sounds by dragging their icons to the System Folder icon. The
user can store desk accessories in the Apple Menu Items folder within the
System Folder or anywhere in the volume. You can now distribute fonts and
desk accessories as movable resource files with separate icons.
The Finder now lets you create one or more icons for a single document or
other desktop object; one of the icons represents the real object, and the others
are aliases that point to the object. Aliases can give convenient access to
documents that are nested within many folders or that reside on a file server.
The Finder can display help balloons with de scriptive text when the user
moves the cursor to certain elements of the Finder user interface while help is
activated. In addition, if you use standard windows in your application, the
Help Manager automatically displays help balloons for standard elements of the window, like the title bar and close box. You can use the features of the
Help Manager to display help balloons for other elements of the user interface of your application. For example, you can create help balloons for
menus, dialog boxes, and controls used by your application.
features.
Your application can create and play sounds, mix and synchronize multiple
channels of sound, expand and compress sound data, record sound, and play
from playing a single sound to playing a set of digitally recorded sounds. You
can also compress sound data for efficient storage of sound data on disk, and
expand compressed sound data in real time.
See the Sound Manager for complete information on using sound in your application.
TrueType Fonts
System 7.0 provides support for TrueType fonts. The section on the Font Manager uses equations (instead of bitmaps) to define the appearance of glyphs in TrueType fonts. After using the equation to define a specific glyph in a particular font, the Font Manager translates the outline to a bitmap for display on the screen.
generate glyphs at any size. The TrueType font includes instructions that fine-tune the image of the font at different sizes. TrueType fonts are also resolution independent; the same TrueType font can generate glyphs on a 72 dpi device or a 300 dpi device.
Your application can immediately take advantage of TrueType fonts if they are supported by the user's system software. However, the Font Manager still supports bitmapped fonts, and gives preference to bitmapped fonts over
TrueType fonts if both are available for a specific typeface at a particular size.
To offer full support for TrueType fonts, your application can provide a menu command (such as Size or Other) to let the user choose any size of a TrueType font. Your application can also request that the Font Manager always choose TrueType fonts over bitmapped fonts. The Figure below shows an example of on-screen glyphs generated using a
TrueType font and a bitmapped font. The left side of the figure shows glyphs in a TrueType font that is rendered at 12, 16, 19, 24, 31, 37, and 45 points. The right side of the figure shows glyphs in a bitmapped font scaled at the same
sizes.
information on using TrueType fonts in your application.