Static menus

The Application menubar contains five menus: Pda, File, Search, Window, Help.

Pda This menu is specific to Mac platforms. The menu items relevant to Pda would be About Pda and Preferences. At this point, neither item is operational. For Preferences, you go instead to the Window menu, where you will find an item called Pda Preferences.

File The primary menu item under File is Switch Workspace…. This item simply leads to a navigation dialogue in which you pick the folder location of the next workspace you want to use. A workspace is a database containing protocol libraries, in turn possibly partitioned into working sets. Use this menu item to locate the folder in which your desired workspace is contained. You may have different workspaces, but you should keep each in a separate folder.

Search This item has three entries: Search …, File, and Pda Search, the first of which really contains the other two. Pick Search… and you will see all choices offered to you. The Pda tab is the most interesting, since it enables you to search either your working set or your whole workspace for nodes (protocols, constructors, or rules) or references to nodes. You can see this at work by searching for P_6_1_1. The result is shown in the next figure. Notice that a Search Glass icon has been inserted at the third slot in the Browser menubar to indicate that the list of displayed protocols has been cut back to contain only the single one with a reference to the node P_6_1_1. To recover your original workspace display, you can select the Clear search results, which is available in the context menu in the search view.

Window This item has four options: Open Perspective, Show View, Reset Perspective, Pda Preferences. Open Perspective has the same functionality as the Other icon at the rightmost end of the Pda toolbar. You will probably just need the Pda option within that dialogue. Show View is more interesting. The next figure displays the various palettes that can be brought up for your support. We will address key palette options in the section on Usage Tips.

For now we just display the result of selecting the Navigation option.

Reset Perspective returns you to the default setting for Pda. Pda Preferences provides a list of options, some self-explanatory. We refer the reader to the Usage Tips section for a discussion of the more advanced options.

Help Search contents is not yet available in Pda. Software updates offers the dialogue shown in the next figure. We advise the reader to pick the second radio button option and then select the Pda filter to check for Pda updates.