What Is Stationery?

An Example of Stationery in the Names Application

You can't change how the data displays in the Notepad (other than the overview), but you can in other applications. So, stationery has to be able to take this into account. Let's look at the Names application as an example of this.

In Names, users can add different kinds of data to a single soup entry. For example, tapping on the summaries from the All Info display brings up different ways to edit the soup entry (see FIGURE 11.3). Each of these different ways to edit the data corresponds to different views. These views are in turn supported by stationery and as such extensible. You can add yet another view display to Names-- perhaps a view that includes information about favorite Web sites and addresses.

Further, the Names application ships with three different kinds of soup entries (Person, Company, Group), and any given soup entry can have many different editors (such as address, e-mail). Through stationery you might want to supply not just a specialized Internet card view, but a fancy editor which makes adding URLs a snap as well.

FIGURE 11.3 : The Names application with two different views of a card.


An online version of Programming for the Newton using Macintosh, 2nd ed. ©1996, 1994, Julie McKeehan and Neil Rhodes.

Last modified: 1 DEC 1996