3 Improving The Design

3.6 Adding a status bar

As well as a tool bar, most applications have a status bar. This is a bar that runs along the bottom edge of the main application window, and displays information about the current status of the application. At its most basic, a status bar provides a label that displays text of some sort. In many applications, status bars contain a number of different fields, providing a wide range of functionality. At their most complex, a status bar may have several different labels that display information about the current state of the application, and labels that display help for the currently selected menu command.

It is worth adding a very simple status bar to the task list application. This contains a label that could eventually be used to display the name of the file currently loaded into the application. Adding a status bar to the definition of a frame class is very similar to adding a tool bar: you need to define a pane that describes the status bar, and then you need to incorporate it using the status-bar clause.

pane task-status-bar (frame)
  make(<status-bar>, label: "Task Manager");
// more definitions here
status-bar (frame) frame.task-status-bar;

Now you have added a status bar to the application. The next step is to glue all the pieces together once again to create your modified frame design.