The version you have in your hands is a Preview Release version of what we hope will be the next generation Kaleidoscope Scheme editor.
It's compatible with Mac OS 8 and above, or the System 7 family if you've installed the Appearance Manager available from Apple.
By the time we are done with Scheme Factory, it will be a one-stop shop for creating a Kaleidoscope Scheme, from start to finish.
Unfortunately, because this is a Preview Release, it's far from complete. For now, we'll focus on the features of this version.
The Features
Preview Release 1 of Scheme Factory will contain two distinct types of editing environments: the window editor and the control editor. While this doesn't sound like much, it will allow you to make over 90% of your Kaleidoscope Scheme functional without having to enter a resource editing environment.
Note: In the version we're supplying you with at this time, you will need a separate application (clip2cicn) to get your images into Scheme Factory. In the next major release we will allow you to copy images from your image editing environment and paste them directly into Scheme Factory.
The Window Editor
The window editor will let you define how your window works: what stretches, what goes away in low space, where text will appear and much, much more. This is done by defining five areas of your window: the "Regions", and each of the four sides.
The "Regions" are rectangles which define specific areas of your window. In a standard document window (like the one you're in now) you have a content region which defies the portion of the window you see the content in, like this web page, and you have regions that define where the "hot spots" are for you window controls, like the close box, the zoom box and the collapse box. You also have one final region in a document window: the title text region. This defines where, in the context of the rest of your window, the title text will appear.
The sides of your window are where you define how the elements you've created in your window grow, shrink, expand, and disappear as the user resizes it.