Thread: OS X Window Management

Firstly, let me say a big "Thank You!" to all of you who've worked so
hard to get pgAdmin3 to build nicely on Mac OS X! It's really come a
long way since I started playing with it last year.

I'm running on wxWidgets CVS and pgAdmin3 CVS. The build worked great,
apart from the non-executable script in the "make install" process.

There's a window management issue that needs to be addressed if
pgAdmin3 OS X is to be properly Mac-ish. The standard way to manage an
app's open windows in OS X would be to have a Window menu listing all
the open windows of the application, plus a Cmd-` keyboard shortcut to
cycle between open windows. pgAdmin3 is lacking these features. The
best  workaround right now is to right-click the pgAdmin3 icon in the
Dock (taskbar analog), which gives you a list of all open windows.

I brought this up here a while ago, and it was mentioned that since
pgAdmin3 is an SDI app, the Window menu doesn't really apply. However,
on the Mac, all apps are sort of MDI. I'm not sure if this is something
that should be addressed in pgAdmin3 itself or in wxMac.

Thoughts?

Thanks again! It's great to see my pgAdmin3 finally have a real icon on
it!

Leon

leon-pg@comvision.com wrote:
> I'm running on wxWidgets CVS and pgAdmin3 CVS. The build worked great,
> apart from the non-executable script in the "make install" process.
Hm.. when did you checkout the sources? This should be fixed in the
latest CVS version.

> There's a window management issue that needs to be addressed if pgAdmin3
> OS X is to be properly Mac-ish. The standard way to manage an app's open
> windows in OS X would be to have a Window menu listing all the open
> windows of the application, plus a Cmd-` keyboard shortcut to cycle
> between open windows. pgAdmin3 is lacking these features. The best
> workaround right now is to right-click the pgAdmin3 icon in the Dock
> (taskbar analog), which gives you a list of all open windows.
As someone else here pointed out, the Cmd-Q/Cmd-W handling is wrong too...
Cmd-Q should quit pgadmin, no matter which windows is currently frontmost,
and cmd-w should close the currently open window (And should probably have
either no effect for the main window, or act like cmd-q there...)

There are also two quit-menu-items, one in the File-menu, and one
in the application menu...

I don't have an idea how to fix this, though - I believe that wxMac should
level those plattform differenced, because it's not pretty to put ifdefs
all over the code for this, but maybe it's hard to do at the library-level...

I checked the wxwindows homepage a few days ago, and didn't find
a statement if wxmac is supposed to support this behaviour...
wxMac already supports a few mac-quirks though (like moving the about-
menu-entry to the application menu), so maybe they could be persuaded
to add more of this...

Since a) my wxwidgets experience is very limited (I just added a few
line of code to pgadmin to support loading *.xrc and doc-files from the
bundle), b) my spare-time is limited too, any help on osx-improvements
would be very much appreciated ;-)

greetings, Florian Pflug