>That comes with the Appearance control panel, I think. I'm not sure why this
>is necessary for Pov-Ray other than that it makes it look nicer. An
>improvement, yes; but I'm unconvinced that they couldn't simply have left the
>previous interface for the Preferences window if the control panel was missing.
>Anyway, I forget whether or not MacOS 7.6 has the Appearance cdev or not...
>but it sounds like you don't have it... so my only suggestion is to see if
>your computer (and wallet) will let you install MacOS 8. I know that's not
>great to hear (or read) if you just want to use a free program but unless they
>remove that requirement you may have to...

Let me explain this... We use the appearance manager for a simple reason: clean code!
The Appearance Manager adds a lot of stuff to the APIs and building dialogs is much
easier. Additionally, the old code would not have worked very well with the MacOS 8.5
themes. If you try it now, you will see that it works just fine. So it is not simply a
random requirement, it is absolutly needed for future compatibility! Of course we
could have let the interface as it was and move it to windows, but then we would have
had to add a lot of "features" by hand, e.g. the original toolbox does not offer a
simple way to deactivate all controls in a window/dialog at once - therfore the
controls would have to be deactivated by hand when the window is in background. With
the appearance manager its just *one* function call! And in the fisrt internal alpha
version I implemented the image window controls by hand (without appearance manager),
and after we decided to use appearance manager I could easily throw out more than 10%
of the code and still have a better/cleaner user interface. The same goes for the
dialogs. E.g. in the Application Preferences dialog there is the nice feature of the
fonts displayed in their native styles - this required a special, selfmade MDEF before
appearance manager!
I hope this makes things clear. And if you still don't believe appearance manager is
useful, I invite you to look into the source code as soon as the final version is out!
- Then, I am sure, you wikll know why we made this decision!!!


Thorsten

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