Hi All, As others have pointed out, the Workspace Manager under NeXTSTEP 3.0 has an API! One new feature is the ability to create contents inspectors that show the contents of various file types from within the Workspace Manager's inspector panel. The Workspace Manager itself provides contents inspectors for various file types already known to the system, e.g. .eps, .tiff, .rtf, etc. Included in this directory is AIInspector.bundle which provides a Workspace Manager inspector for Adobe Illustrator files. THIS IS EXTREMELY BARE BONES STUFF. All it does is mimic the features of the stock eps Image Inspector. I hope to spark some interest in collecting some useful extensions to the WM for the community. (Ok, this is a trivial example; but we have to start somewhere!) For those that don't care about code: Just copy the AIInspector.bundle (it's actually a directory) to some place in your "application search path" such as ~/Apps. Have the Workspace Manager update its viewers (cmd-u). And you're golden! Select an .ai file in a File Browser and bring up the contents inspector (cmd-2). You should get the image of the file (assuming it's been saved with EPS headers, which is the default). Note that I didn't bother to implement a display button like the eps inspector has that forces you to expressly request imaging if WM thinks your image is really big and imaging might take a long time. I always figure that if you want to inspect something, you really want to inspect something. It'll take just as long/longer for a full blown app to image the file. (Bottom line - there is some delay in updating the inspector display if you have a really big or complicated image.) For those that care about code: There are only two classes: AIInspector and AIView. AIInspector is the subclass of WMInspector which handles messages from the WM to do something with a particular file. AIView is a convenient object for handling/sizing the imaging of the file as well as updating some textfields that tell about the size/scale of the image. That's about it. If you come up with any meaningful enhancements please send them to me or, better yet, upload to the archives. Enjoy, Terrence Talbot <tjt@dtw.com> Digital Tool Works Boston PS Remember, this is a trivial example: there are no guarantees and no warranties supplied. This is merely a free public service to the community. If you're worried that installing the bundle will have adverse effects, don't install it. PPS I'm not releasing the inspector for EqB files since that will go in the EqB 3.0 release, and it's really the same code. Just edit the extension field in bundle.registry to change ai to eqn and recompile. If this is unclear or you don't have the dev environment, send me a note.
These are the contents of the former NiCE NeXT User Group NeXTSTEP/OpenStep software archive, currently hosted by Netfuture.ch.
