UI issues with dialogs

[Nicholas Riley]

Here's another one.  Dialogs (dialog.ask, dialog.notify, etc) can 
come up in the background on Frontier/Radio on OS X and they pause 
execution of the entire app, serving, etc.

There are two classes of dialogs I can think of, and different 
solutions for each:

1. I pick something from the dock menu, say Radio/Upstreaming, and 
Radio asks me a question.  I have to click on Radio's icon, otherwise 
the app stalls.  Because I initiated the action, Radio should come to 
the front automatically (Frontier.bringToFront ()).  I've done this 
myself by editing the builtins.dialog scripts, but I don't like 
messing with UserLand's code.  Perhaps the answer here is a flag that 
will indicate that an action is user-initiated and should preempt the 
active app.

2. Frontier wants to tell me something.  For example, it seems to 
randomly say "nightly updates ready to run", which I don't really 
care about, but it stops Frontier serving until I click OK.  Frontier 
should use the Notification Manager here, so you get the appropriate 
result (app icon flashing, dock icon bouncing, "Frontier needs 
attention" message, etc.).

There should also be some kind of option for dialog timeouts for 
purely informational dialogs, where the contents are logged after the 
timeout.  If you use the Carbon standard alerts, this is very easy to 
do, and you get automatic dialog resizability too (which I'm sure 
everyone else wants...)  On OS 9 I used Okey-Dokey, but there is no 
equivalent on OS X.

In the long term, it would be good to have the ability to easily post 
an asynchronous onscreen notification, perhaps something like the 
little yellow utility windows that Mac OS 9.x use for Notification 
Manager alerts.
-- 
Nicholas Riley <njriley at mac.com> | <http://web.sabi.net/nriley/>