Chapter 7: continued Chapter 7: continuedThe Net menu is new to Frontier 4. See the Frontier website for details.
Figure 7-21 shows the Custom menu as delivered by UserLand. This menu is the one you are most likely to want to make your own, so its appearance is almost certain to vary over time. (If you prefer to keep your changes separate, consider a new menu -- perhaps named with your initials.)
Figure 7-21. Frontier's Custom MenuAs with most of the Frontier menus, the first item in this menu opens a word processing text document that describes this menu and its use. The next three items open specific objects: Notepad (an outline which is automatically part of your people table and which you may find useful for storing lists and reminders), your people table (the default location for you to add scripts and data), and the table root.examples (which is used extensively in DocServer). The second of these menu items will have the initials of the current user appended to the people label.
With the User Is... option, you can change the identity of the person using this copy of Frontier. While only one user at a time can use any copy of Frontier, you can switch users when necessary. If you choose this option, you'll be shown a dialog like the one in Figure 7-22. This is identical to the one you see when you first install Frontier. By changing the user's name and initials -- or just the user's initials -- you can allow a different user with a separate people table to use this copy of the Object Database.
Figure 7-22. Personalization Dialog for Changing Users in FrontierThe next four items in the Custom menu are quite similar to each other. They are designed as places for you to be able to add your favorite applications to launch, folders to open, documents to edit in other applications, and control panels to open. You can even add other types of things you might want to launch if you have others that aren't covered by these four categories.
As they come to you from UserLand, these menus have hierarchical sub-menus that open, among others, the DocServer and BarChart applications that are part of the Frontier product line that you receive, the Frontier and System folders, and two Control Panels: Startup and Monitors.
The Suites menu (see Figure 7-24) provides a launching pad for a number of suites included with Frontier. Suites are collections of related UserTalk scripts attached to one or more private menus. The subject is discussed in greater detail in Chapter 10.
Figure 7-24. Suites MenuThe first item on this menu, About the Suites Menu... is similar to the other About... menu items we've seen. It explains this menu and its use in a word processing text document.
Minimal Menus, or Command-hyphen, is quite useful. When you've finished using a suite, you can use this menu option to remove its menu from the menubar.
The rest of the items on this menu generate their own menus, which are discussed later in this chapter.
The Window menu contains a list of all of the windows that are open in Frontier. The Window menu is permanent; its contents are dynamic but not scriptable. Figure 7-25 shows you a typical menu example.Contents Page | Previous Section | Next Section -- Dynamic "Object" Menus
Figure 7-25. Typical Window MenuEach of the symbols and styles in this menu means something. A diamond character is used to indicate the current root file in use. (You may have more than one open, as shown in Figure 7-25.) An underlined window name means that object's contents have changed since they were last saved. The checkmark identifies the frontmost window.
The menu tracks different kinds of documents in each section. The top section for root files, the next for Frontier "dialogs" including Quick Script and Find, the third for tables, the fourth for outlines and the last for word processing text documents. If there are no open items in a particular category, Frontier skips that section.
