TITLE
    Mac OS 8.5: Control Strip - Under the Hood
Article ID:
Created:
Modified: 		30738
9/8/98
10/14/98
TOPIC

    What's different about the new Control Strip in Mac OS 8.5?

DISCUSSION

    Functionally, Control Strip appears to be the same in appearance and action as previous versions. However, the underpinnings of its design have changed to improve it's stability and integration with the Mac OS.

    In previous releases of Mac OS, Control Strip was a true Control Panel (of type "cdev") which made patches to the OS to get its floating palette into the environment.

    In Mac OS 8.5, Control Strip is now an application, of type "APPC", that resides in the Control Panels folder. In addition, there is an new file called Control Strip Extension, in the Extensions folder, which is launched as a faceless background application (file type "appe"). This process conforms more to Mac OS guidelines of providing function without making dynamic patches to the OS. This process runs silently in the background, handling such things as recognizing the hot keys to toggle visibility and providing a foundation environment for execution of strip module functions.

    This new faceless background application can be noticed if you are running an application, such as DragThing, which displays all running processes. You could also detect its presence by running the following AppleScript from the Script Editor:

    Tell application "Finder" to get the name of every process

    The result window will normally show "Control Strip Extension" in the list of active processes. It will not show in the application menu, because background tasks are defined to have no user interface. The Control Strip application in Control Panels, when launched, communicates with the background process, providing the necessary user interface for making setting changes for Control Strip.

    If the faceless background application terminates, then the Control Strip will not be visible nor will it respond to the hide/show hot keys. If this is the case, when the Control Strip application is launched from Control Panels, it will notice that its "partner" process is not active and offer to restart the background process. This will usually restore normal functionality.

Document Information
Product Area: Mac OS System Software
Category: Mac OS 8.5
Sub Category: General OS Topics

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