[platform-swt-dev] Mac Pasteboard & ImageTransfer

[Peter Centgraf <peter@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi SWT Folks,

I have two questions related to SWT Clipboard:

1. The Mac OS X implementation is based on deprecated Scrap Manager  
APIs, rather than the Pasteboard Manager APIs.  The primary  
difference is that the Pasteboard Manager users more flexible Uniform  
Type Identifiers (e.g. "public.png") rather than Classic-style packed  
integer OSTypes (e.g. "PNGf").  There are support functions for  
mapping UTIs to file extensions, MIME types, OSTypes, etc. and  
managing hierarchical conformance relationships.  These features make  
UTIs better suited for bundled Mac RCP applications.  Is there any  
plan to migrate to the Pasteboard APIs?

2. There is currently no ImageDataTransfer type to handle conversion  
from native clipboard formats (Windows CF_DIB, Mac PICT or PDF, etc.)  
to ImageData.  Are there any plans to add this functionality?  PICT  
in particular is problematic, since there's no ImageFormat support  
available for a ByteArrayTransfer workaround.  I believe it would be  
relatively easy to support PICT by rendering it to raster via native  
calls (only on the Mac, obviously) -- dodging the whole hairy file  
format parsing problem.  Windows DIB requires only minor header  
rework before the BMP ImageFormat will grok.  AFAIK, GTK also uses  
standard image formats with MIME types, so a simple ImageLoader  
facade should be sufficient.  Would the SWT team be friendly towards  
a patch submission for this?  Would it be likely to be targeted for  
3.2 with some starter code behind it?

As always, thanks for the great work!

--
Peter Centgraf
Research Programmer,
Human-Computer Interaction Institute
Carnegie Mellon University