Mac Forum / Programming / Mac Programming / July 2005

I'm writing in Carbon using Xcode 2. I use several push buttons (created in
Resorcerer) on each of several views in a single window (I use tabs to
transfer from view to view). Each view has a different color background and
contains editable fields set up via Text Edit for user input. My problem is
that I would like to designate a default pushbutton for each view, but I
can't get rid of the white background surrounding the default pushbutton
(the one that pulsates). It became apparent to me as I kept experimenting
that the default pushbutton must be constantly redrawing itself in order to
create the blue pulsating animation effect, because I can get rid of the
white background in the other pushbuttons simply by temporarily changing the
window's background color with calls to RGBBackColor just before they are
drawn, but for a default pushbutton, I realized that its definition function
is apparently called continuously which therefore includes redrawing
continually the background color of the window it's in. However, I can't
simply change the window's background color to the color of my view because
I need to keep the white background for the text fields. Is there a way to
control a default pushbutton's background color without having to write an
entirely new CDEF? One clue I came across was to define a custom user pane,
which has a tag to control the background color. But will using this really
control the background color of the pulsating pushbutton itself? Will the
loop it enters go to the background color of the user pane, or will it still
utilize only the window's background color? Is there even a simpler, more
direct way to resolve this, even if the user pane approach will work? Maybe
there's more up to date info of which I am simply unaware. Any help would be
much appreciated.

ECDixon