Hi list

I've justed finished reading MacTech - November 98
(I am allowed 5 minutes of leisure from time to time)
especially the article "Programmer's Introduction to
Mac OS 8.5" by Dan Parks Sydow, and have come to believe
that what we need for FB is:
* a wrapper for calling Nav Services that defaults to
  Standard Open/Save File if the Services aren't there,
* a wrapper to call MenuManager 2.0 that defaults to
  standard Menu Manager if the new one isn't there, but
  with perhaps an option for the MercutioMDEF if the
  programmer wants to include it in the resource fork
  of his/her application,
* similar critters for Dialog Manager 2.0 and Window
  Manager 2.0...,
* a wrapper to call Appearance Manager features that
  provided home-grown code if the Appearance Manager
  is not there.

Ideally these should be:
* transparent for the programmer: gestalt would be called
  be the code, not the programmer
* transparent in their substitution; perhaps using a syntax
  (as Rick suggested for home-grown Toolbox calls of preceeding
  the name with FB) that means that the call is intercepted by
  the code, and it is the code that routes it off to the 
  appropriate place.

The idea being that rather than just decoding, translating and
providing the new calls, code (librairies ?) such as these
would allow them to be just dumped in old projects, the name of
a few calls changed, and they would take advantage of OS 8+
features. The same technique could also be used as more new
features are introduced.

Is this feasible? possible? reasonable? already done?

jonathan

PS. Supposedly these features are explained for programmers
somewhere in <http://developer.apple.com/sdk>, although I
haven't had time to go and seek out stuff for myself.