The User-Interface Toolbox
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The toolbox (which occupies two-thirds of the high-speed 64K-byte ROM inside
the Macintosh) includes optimized 68000 machine-language routines that handle
all aspects of the Macintosh user interface – things like windows,
text, the mouse, pull-down menus, desk accessories, dialogue boxes, and
fonts. The figure below shows the relative relationships among the different
units (or packages of routines). Here is a brief description of each unit,
starting with the lowest-level unit and working up:
- Resource Manager: These routines coordinate the use of resources,
which are data structures such as text strings, menus, and icon and font
definitions. These resources are kept separate from the actual code of an application,
which means that the resources of an application can be modified without
forcing a recompilation (or modification) of the application program.
The Resource Manager is usually called by higher units like the
menu and font managers.
- Font Manager: This unit supports the use of various text fonts. It
calls the resource manager when it needs to use a font not already in memory,
and it is usually called by the Quickdraw unit.
- Quickdraw: Quickdraw is a graphics package that is at the heart of both
the Lisa and Macintosh computers. Bill Atkinson, its creator, worked for
3½ years on the code, rewriting it many times and reducing it from
a 160K-byte compiled Pascal program to a 24K-byte package of highly optimized
68000 code. Atkinson, who was involved in the early design of the Lisa’s
user interface, designed and optimized Quickdraw for the Lisa computer; he
later joined the Macintosh design team. draw is very fast – for example,
it can print to the screen more than 7000 characters per second. Two of its
most interesting capabilities are its ability to fill in any arbitrary shape
with a pattern and its ability to “clip” an image to correspond to
the boundaries of an arbitrary masking shape. The latter ability is needed
to correctly display window contents when one window overlaps others. The
source code for Quickdraw is identical in both the Lisa and the Macintosh.
- Event Manager: All system events (e.g., keypresses and mouse button
presses) are received and interpreted through this unit, which mediates between
the application program and the outside world.
- Toolbox Utilities: These routines handle miscellaneous tasks that
include string operations, fixed-point arithmetic, and bitwise logical
operations.
- Window Manager: Since all action on the Macintosh display occurs
within windows, this is a very important unit that is used a lot. The
Window Manager allows the application program to interact with windows on
a high level while it takes care of the low-level details automatically.
It allows you to create different kinds of boxes (document, dialogue, and
alert boxes, for example), delete them, move them, change their size, and
make an inactive window active and vice versa. The Window Manager ensures
that the computer automatically redraws the necessary screen areas when some
aspect of a window is changed.
- Control Manager: This unit controls the use of software buttons,
check boxes, and dials, all of which can be called on to show and alter the
status of certain variables.
- Menu Manager: Given a two-dimensional matrix of menu items (each
column is a menu title followed by its selections), this unit controls
the display and behavior of that matrix of pull-down menus.
- Text Edit: These routines control elementary text entry and editing.
Text Edit is designed with lots of software “hooks” so that
you can modify its behavior but still use it. An external unit called
Core Edit, which must be loaded into RAM, contains more sophisticated
entry and editing routines; Core Edit can handle different fonts,
sizes, and text styles.
- Dialog Manager: Dialogue boxes are text boxes with several check
boxes; usually, clicking the mouse button near a box selects it (and the
action or condition associated with it) and unselects the previously checked
box. An alert box (as in figure 1h) alerts you to a potentially dangerous
situation and forces you to click on one of two buttons, “Cancel”
or “OK.” The Dialog Manager handles the display of and user
response to a dialogue or alert box.
- Desk Manager: This unit allows the application program to use
the desk accessories, which are resources that are called in from disk
if they are not currently in memory.
Applications can be written in Mac BASIC, Mac Pascal, or 68000 assembly
language (usually one of the latter two). Both Mac Pascal and Mac BASIC
are designed so that their keywords directly call most of the toolbox
routines. Most applications that use the routines are essentially an endlessly
repeating loop that waits for an event, determines what kind of event
it is, and then processes the event.
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