hierDA 0.9984 Release Notes:  (first and only draft)

Changes since Òspirit of Õ83Ó:
The pop-up menu-bar-if-you-click-on-the-desktop feature now works under MultiFinder, even if the Finder is the top-most application.
hierDAÕs control panel options include one named ÒOnly if shift is downÓ, which means that command-keys canÕt be used to invoke DAÕs pop-out menus unless the shift-key is down.  This is so that if you type command-whatever in an application thinking it will do something, but that menu item isnÕt available, you wonÕt go launching a DA instead.  If this version, this has been expanded to mean use the DAsÕ menus if either the shift, option, or control keys is down.
When using an AppleTalk-intensive utility such as InBox, occasionally hard drives wonÕt appear on the desktop when they ought to.  This version of hierDA corrects that.
Applications which have an apple menu with absolutely nothing in them used to crash if you clicked in the menu bar.  Now they donÕt.
Sometimes the DiskTop submenu contained a bunch of garbage at the end; it wonÕt anymore.

Changes since Òspirit of Õ79Ó:
A nasty bug that manifested itself in the first application run after booting, if you were running under Suitcase and not under MultiFinder, has been squashed.  This is most commonly known as the ÒRemember? DAÓ bug, since it occured mainly if you had the Remember? DA/INIT combo.
The docs used to say that you could use option to set which cdev would come up as first by default in the Control Panel.  Actually, you canÕt, and this has been corrected.  Miscellaneous other typos were corrected also, and info regarding hierDA 1.0 was added:
THERE IS NOT NOW AND NEVER WILL BE A SOLID hierDA 1.0!!!  I made a version named 1.0 a long time ago and thought that all the people IÕd given it to had destroyed it.  Apparently they hadnÕt, and a copy resurfaced on GEnie recently.  VERSION 1.0 IS VERY BUGGY AND YOU SHOULD STAY AWAY FROM IT AT ALL COSTS.
WHEN I FINISH WORKING ALL THE BUGS OUT OF THIS RELEASE, IÕLL DISTRIBUTE IT AS 1.1.
<enough of that..>
The pop-up menu-bar-if-you-click-on-the-desktop feature now works under MultiFinder, unless the Finder is on top, in which case it doesnÕt.  (this is so you can select things on the desktop.)  Unfortunately this means that hierDA will probably break under System 7.0; oh well.
The main hierDA patch has been significantly sped up, so those of you using Don BrownÕs EZ-Menus INIT and those of you without 68020 or better processors wonÕt feel bogged down.
Occasionally when you clicked on the menu bar hierDA would put up its pop-up menu; this has been fixed.
The ÒthumbÓ (the little white square in the scroll bar) of hierDAÕs cdev has been made active; try it and see what you think.  It is a violation of the user-interface guidelines, but it was fun to do...
The option that allowed command-keys to activate hierDA menus has been altered slightly; if you select Òonly with shift-key downÓ hierDA will now also allow access if the option-key is down.  This is so that you can put option-command-equivalents in custom menus.  If you donÕt understand this, donÕt worry about it.  Eventually a better way of explaining this stuff will occur to meÉÉ
This release has a really good chance of becoming 1.1.

Changes since Òspirit of Õ78Ó:
A severe bug that manifested itself mainly in MultiFinder 6.1b7 has been fixed.  Previously if you had any DAs longer than 31 letters (including spaces) hierDA would crash; this included the ÒSet AsideÓ item under MF 6.1b7 which tended to be that long..  This has been fixed.
Under 9978, a DA which supported command-key equivalents for a menu it put up (such as Acta or miniWriter or McSink, etc.) wouldnÕt work right: any command-key you used would act as if you had used it twide.   This has been fixed.
Under 9978, a DA such as McSink which used hierarchical menus would appear under the Apple menu with its first-level menu only.  THIS WILL NOT EVER BE FIXED.  However, if the McSink DA was open the hierarchical menus WOULD appear, but selecting them had no effect.  This has been fixed.
Under all previous hierDAs, there was no good way to use hierDA to open up a DA such as McSink to do anything useful.... Under 9979 and in the future, hierDA supports MENU subID 31 resources which will map to real menus; this is hard to explain and even harder to get working, so let me give a simple example:  If you add a menu of subID 31 to McSink using ResEdit (if you donÕt feel comfortale using ResEdit skip this note), and the items are ÒOpen...Ó, ÒNewÓ, ÒList filesÓ, and ÒQuitÓ, then that menu will show up in the apple menu instead of the normal one that hierDA puts there. (as long as you have custom submenus turned on, of course.)  If you select one of these items then hierDA will first open up McSink, then search through McSinkÕs menu looking for those items.  In the future I hope that Dave McWherter (McSinkÕs author) will see fit to include such a subID 31 resource so this will be available to everyone without having to go through ResEdit; weÕll see....

Changes since Òspirit of Õ77Ó:
The bug that crashed Microsoft Word 4.0 and a few other products has been quashed, and a potential bug which would occur when switching to a different system disk has been eliminated.  This release has a good chance of becoming 1.0.

Changes since ÒSpirit of Ô76Ó:
The old hierDAÕs general submenu selection feature didnÕt work with some versions of MultiFinder.  Also, the old hierDA was somewhat naive about the System Heap and just kindof assumed everything was OK.  The new hierDA makes sure thereÕs at least 4K of space in the system heap for other programs beside itself.  Hopefully this will solve a few of the bugs that have been reported.  Finally, the strange characters that sometimes showed up on the left hand side of the Control Panel submenu have been eliminated.

hierDA 0.9977 is an almost total re-write of hierDA, an INIT/cdev for adding hierarchical menus to the Apple menu.  Rather than describe the features of hierDA, which are listed in the cdev, IÕll try to explain some of the more technical changes and bugs fixed in this release:

(1) Menus are now stored in the system heap rather than the application heap.
 
    What this means is that hierDAÕs menus are stored in a section of memory which stays around between application launches, rather than being stored in the section of memory which exists for applications only and gets blown away every time a program is launched.  This has three effects: First, under MultiFinder, the menus are in only one place in memory rather than being in several different places, once for each application.  Second, the new hierDA is faster, since it has no need to re-construct its menus every time a program is started.  Third, some applications (certain versions of Microsoft products) get upset when foreign data appears in their heaps, and this doesnÕt happen anymore.

(2) hierDA menus are inserted Òon the flyÓ rather than existing in the menu structure always.

    This is basically a compatibility issue.  MacApp 1.11 and earlier assumed that all menus were menus that it had created, and as program initialization, it disabled them all.  This meant that all hierDA menus were inaccessible from within MacApp.  On very early versions of hierDA, it also meant that MacApp programs crashed because of a numbering scheme problem.
    Unfortunately it also means that there is a little bit of a delay between when you click on the menu bar and when the menus actually start appearing.  If this is a problem, please let me know; I can speed this up a bit if need be.  *** version 9983 has a speed-up in it.  Is it still too slow? ***

(3) Changes to options settings in the hierDA cdev take effect immediately.  For example, if you turn off all the menu settings on the left hand side, and pull down the Apple menu, none of the hierDA menus will appear.  On previous versions, the settings only took effect after programs were launched.

(4) hierDA command-key equivalents no longer override command-key equivalents in hierarchical menus of some applications, and turning off the ÒCommand-keys enabledÓ option no longer disables the command-key equivalents of hierarchical menus is some applications.

(5) hierDA now works properly with Font/DA Juggler.

    The same fix that applies to FDAJ also fixes problems with MultiClip.  If you use FDAJ, be sure to re-name hierDA to ÒDA MenuzÓ or some such so that hierDA loads BEFORE FDAJ does.  This will ensure that menus are properly matched to their DA owners.  In any case, loading hierDA in the wrong order no longer crashes the Mac, as it did before.
   Actually, this release of hierDA is named DA Menuz because of FDAJ.

(6) hierDA under MultiFinder now opens up the right cdev.

    Under the old hierDA, if you changed the number of cdevs in the System Folder, and then tried to use hierDA to open one up, the wrong one got opened.  This was because hierDA remembered which one you picked by its position in hierDAÕs list.  If that list changed between the time you picked the cdev and when Control Panel opened, the cdev would appear in a different position in the list and hierDA got confused.

-- Known anomalies --

(Anomalies are things that are so minor that no-one cares and no-one notices that they exist.)

Under MultiFinder, the test to see if youÕve hit the little icon in the upper right hand corner only tests the horizontal position of the mouse.  This is fine if youÕre using the menu bar normally, but if you use the pop-up menu bar feature, it gets a little weird: any time you try to use the pop-up menu bar with mouse directly underneath the icon, youÕll switch layers instead!  This is a bug in all versions of hierDA that provided a pop-up menu bar.
Under newer versions of hierDA, the pop-up menu bar is more active under MultiFinder, and this means that if you click on the desktop directly under the little MultiFinder icon, youÕll switch layers!

-- Known bugs --

None.

-- Other issues --

IÕve received about 150 letters about hierDA so far.  Many people just write to report bugs, and others send a dollar and a disk for a new hierDA.  Now, the old hierDA said IÕd send the new hierDA IMMEDIATELY; I thought I would be making new releases about every two months or so, etc.  The problem is, 9967 was stable enough that there wasnÕt much need to make a new version (9961 was pretty buggy).  So what should I do?  Send people a version of hierDA they already have?  Or send them a new version when I got that done?  I opted for the latter, thinking I would get around to making one within a few weeks anyway...  Yeah, Real Soon Now.  ThatÕs the ticket....

Well, if anyone had been paying attention, the new version of hierDA that I was waiting to send would have been named to a vaporware list.  When it finally gets released, itÕll be about a year after I thought it would and about 16 months after the previous version.  And if someone had really been paying attention, they might have gotten me for mail fraud... Fortunately that hasnÕt happened.  Patience, please - when 1.1 comes out, sometime in July, it will be sent to everyone, along with the goodies I mention.  Those who have sent checks have not had them cashed.

Oh yes, and one more thing:  IÕve gotten a lot of extra cash from a few people - the most often non-1-dollar amount being sent was ten bucks, and IÕve gotten as much as twenty.  My favorite has got to be the Canadian two-dollar bill I got (Note: CanadaÕs money has a picture of Queen Elizabeth on it.) with a note that said: ÒThis is the queen of someone elseÕs country.  I donÕt know why she is on _our_ money!Ó  Cute, BB.

Anyway, the question is should hierDA be shareware?  Originally it was, but I talked with a friend of mine from Apple and he said the shareware market was too crowded.  Suddenly even the most piddly little software that any good programmer could write in his sleep was being offered for shareware sale.  And the number of good programs offered in the public-domain was shrinking rapidly.  I said hierDA was not something I wrote in my sleep.  He said ÒSo? You donÕt need the money, and knowing your ego youÕd be happy just to know there were a ton of people using it.Ó  He was right.  But on the other hand one of the reasons hierDA took so long to get from Ô67 to Ô77 is that I donÕt get anything from hierDA and I have to worry about a real job.  And going from the number of letters IÕve gotten and the number which said I should charge for it, it seems like a good idea.  What do you think?

 -- Reply CIS 73177,1404 EMAIL or on MACPRO, or by USMAIL.  Thanx. --

-- Trivia --

jbx is spelled jbx and is not spelled JBX.  hierDA is not spelled heirDA.

hierDA is pronounced Òhere-duhÓ and everyone in the world is mispronouncing it and sometimes when I correct people they say IÕm the one whoÕs wrong because Desk Accessories are pronounced dee-ays and hierarchical isnÕt pronounced here-ark-ick-ul, itÕs pronounced higher-ark-ick-al.  Therefore, they say, hierDA is pronounced Òhigher-dee-ayÓ.  ThatÕs a good line of reasoning, but what they donÕt realize is that this is English, and nothing that makes any sense was ever used to determine pronounciation.  In English, pronounciation rules are something like Òwell, the guy who first started using that word was German and thatÕs pretty much the way youÕd pronounce it in German.  Besides, that way itÕs less syllables.Ó

hierDA is pronounced Òhere-duhÓ.

Following the same line of reasoning you might try to pronounce jbx in German and then take the b out to make it less syllables, and it would sound like ÒYoattexÓ  Again, this is English, and there are never reasons for things, and jbx is pronounced jay-bee-ex, and ÒDA MenuzÓ is pronounced dee-ay-men-use.

And the reason I use jbx and not my real name is that you guys canÕt pronounce hierDA right, so youÕd never pronounce ÒJšrgÓ right and you might not even pronounce ÒBrownÓ right.

And no, the x isnÕt an initial of mine - only j and b are.