Introduction
Graphisoft's multi-platform Dialog Manager is a perfect tool for writing dialogs on Macintosh or Windows. With the help of this dialog manager you can develop your modal, modeless and palette dialogs faster and easier than using the standard Macintosh or Windows operating system support. This is especially true, if you are developing a program which runs on both platforms.
The description of a dialog, in general, consists of two basic parts: the appearance of the dialog, and the way how it works. Graphisoft provides you the tools to describe both aspects in a platform independent manner.
- Graphisoft developed the GRC resource format which, in conjunction with the Graphisoft resource compiler (GRC compiler), allows you to use the very same resource files on both platforms. The dialog resources are not the only ones the GRC compiler is able to handle; you can also store your other resources - like strings, for example - in GRC files.
- The second component is the Dialog Manager Library itself, which comes as a shared library on Macintosh, or a DLL on Windows, together with all the necessary components to build your application. Currently the Dialog Manager exists on two platforms, Macintosh (System 7.6 to MacOS X) and Microsoft Windows (NT 4.0, Windows 2000 and XP).
Note that later on in this documentation the dialog manager is often referred to as DG only.
