Day 4

Another day that tops 12 hours at the anvil. Transitions between pages are now animated. Default links are now working, and keyboard commands are now hooked up to highlight text links, follow default links, and back up through the text. The link browser is now implemented as a popover.

Status: 18 classes, 13 tests. Not a strong day for test driven design.

Next headache: Storyspace traditionally uses a floating tool palette. These are no longer idiomatic. I think a toolbar beneath the text would make the best sense, but it turns out that (a) bottom bars are prohibited, and (b) icon buttons are in any case prohibited from bottom bars. Moreover, the arrow buttons were never entirely successful, and people misinterpret them. Finally, afternoon famously has its own palette with the critical Yes and No tools and a typing area, so we potentially require multiple toolbars.

Afternoon also requires a text entry area where you can type anything you like, rather than selecting it. The natural approach would be an NSSearchField, but then people would expect it to behave like search. An NSTextField would not suggest “search” so emphatically, but (a) reviewers might assume that it was an incompetent substitute for a search field, and (b) text fields aren’t supposed to appear in toolbars.

Finally, I think the toolbar makes sense at the bottom of the window, but bottom bars are apparently deprecated in Lion. Who knew? One headache after another.