On 5/27/05 12:10 PM, Eric Schlegel didst favor us with:
>
> On May 26, 2005, at 10:45 PM, Laurence Harris wrote:
>
>> Sometimes applications open new windows behind the windows of the active
>> application, and sometimes they open them on top of all other windows (but
>> usually without getting focus, which is annoying). At least this is what I
>> see in 10.3.9. I'm wanting to open a window with the results of some
>> processing. In the past when my application was in the background I've posted
>> a notification and then opened the window when my application was brought
>> forward, but I want to change that to open the window and then post the
>> notification. However, I don't my window opening in front of other
>> applications. How can I ensure that doesn't happen? I'm asking because I'm
>> not really sure why some windows open in front of the active application and
>> others don't. Any thoughts? Thanks,
>
> The short answer is: don't worry about it, because there's really
> nothing you can do anyways. Just create your window, and the OS will
> do its best to open it at an appropriate location. Sometimes, we get
> this wrong; those are our bugs, and in that case, we'd like to hear
> about it so we can try to fix them.
>
> The long answer:
>
> When an app creates a new window that is at the top of its window
> list, both Carbon and Cocoa call the window server to make the window
> visible using a private function that conditionally orders the window
> frontmost. The conditional part is dependent on whether the app that
> owns the window is currently the frontmost process. If so, then you
> get the normal expected behavior; the window is ordered to the very
> top of all windows at that window level. The case you're interested
> in occurs when the owning app is not the frontmost process. In that
> case, the window server attempts to position the window behind the
> active window in the frontmost process.
>
> Determining exactly which window is active can be a somewhat tricky
> business. For example, the active app might have two floating windows
> plus a document window open. A new window opened by an inactive app
> should go behind the document window, not behind any of the floating
> windows. The Carbon Window Manager tracks which window is currently
> the active window (this would be the window that is returned by
> ActiveNonFloatingWindow) and tells the window server when it changes,
> so the window server can put newly opened windows behind that window.
> Occasionally, you'll see applications that do all of their own window
> management with BringToFront and HiliteWindow, and never actually
> call SelectWindow or ActivateWindow; in this case, the Window Manager
> has no information about which window is active, and you can
> potentially wind up with windows from background apps opening at the
> wrong z-order.
>
> We did fix some common cases of background windows opening in front
> of the active app's active window some time ago, around 10.2 I think.
> I haven't seen any new reports of this occuring in quite a while. If
> you have specific reproducible cases, I'd like more information.
Here's a case I see a lot: If CW is compiling and there are errors, CW
displays a window with a list of those errors. If CW is compiling in the
background, that window appears on top of the current application's windows
every time, but it doesn't get focus.
BTW, while we're on this topic, how can I set Mac OS X to use classic window
layering? I.e., to get all windows of an application to stay together
instead of interleaving windows of different applications. I absolutely
despise the Mac OS X approach to layering windows, and years ago I had
something that changed it to use the classic approach. It still works as
long as I just upgrade my OS, but I don't know how to do it to my new Tiger
install.
Larry
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