Sheet Windows - Big Sur has ruined them?

I used to like the slide-out Panels, too.

Anyway, testing my apps in Big Sur, they generally run OK.
However, Ive noticed that sheet windows dont work as they used to.
Instead of a slide down from the top of the window, they appear in an unpredictable (to me) location on screen, and because they have no title bar, cannot be moved.

This makes sheet window style pointless in Big Sur

Is this a Xojo thing (I’m using 2018 to compile on Mac at the mo), a Big Sur thing, or yet another case of ‘Upgrade X, lose Y’ ?

They SHOULD appear in the center of the window, with the window being dimmed.

If that is not the case then I would guess it is a Xojo bug …

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First of all, I would make sure that when you display a sheet window, you are using showWithin or showModalWithin and passing in the window for it to be associated with.

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Personally I like the new “sheets” style in BS, but I do have problems with it.

  1. For simple questions and simply notifications, the iPhone 5 safe dialog can work.
  2. However they should expand and use more horizontal space when there is a lot of text, the current design of making it taller is terrible,
  3. The new alerts include a “destructive” button, which makes it easier to know when clicking on a button is going to delete or lose their work. But I’m not happy that this is for Alert only, has no effect on “sheets” or other windows. Which breaks the point of the style if different apps use different styles throughout their interfaces. Sure you can create a custom control to mimics this, but that creates other problems.

Hopefully Big Sur 2 will correct some of this, like when Yosemite rolled out and was missing some stuff, that got fixed with El Capitan.

Me too. Much better than the sliding sheets.

Can you resize these sheets? Can you still move the window the are no longer attached to? For example, in the IDE, there is the “Choose a Project” panel that (typically at IDE startup) allows one to choose what to open. If I click on the “Open an Existing File…” button, I get a panel to choose to open an existing project. Is this the sort of thing we’re talking about?

Well, I tried SHowmodalwithin, didnt make a lot of difference.
The sheet window appears, and the parent dims, even with ShowModal

I personally don’t like the immediate dimming of the parent - it feels like ‘something broke’ to me.
Maybe I’m too used to seeing Windows apps go like that when they are unresponsive and just before being asked to consider terminating them.

But: the displayed window is not reliably centred horizontally on the screen, which is worse.

Making the sheet window into a movable modal seems to
-cure the positioning,
-allows the user to move it to a more convenient spot, and
-stops the parent from looking broken, so that looks like my workaround.

On the bright side, at least Big Sur hasn’t completely broken all my apps in a way that generates thousands of support queries just before Christmas… :slight_smile:

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I agree, I like the new sheets. In fact, I’m liking Big Sur a lot. I think there are spots where some additional contrast would go a long way, but overall I’m liking the clean, spacious look.

I haven’t tried.

Yes.

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Personally, I find the ability to resize the existing sheet (such as in Mojave) to be very very useful.

OK - you can move the window. Does the non-attached sheet move too?

Also, if the rest of the screen is greyed (shadowed, whatever the word is), does that mean one can no longer click in another window, have that become foreground, do something in it, and then click back in the drop-sheet to resume opening a file or whatever?

Functionally, they haven’t changed at all. They can still be resized, they still stay attached to the parent window, they still prevent interaction with the parent while allowing interaction with other windows. They are functionally identical, they just look different.

Good! Thanks, I was worried that the functionailty might have changed, in a back to the past kind of way.

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