[ACT-R-users] RPM in MCL 5.0b and OS X

[Mike Byrne]

For those of you who are trying to run RPM under MCL 5.0b on OS X:

Apple's Carbon interfaces don't directly support pushing the mouse
around the same way as things worked  under OS 9.  Thus, your code
will bomb under MCL 5.0b and OS X because it will attempt to shove
the cursor around, and that will fail.

The solution is to use the "virtual" cursor, available as
osx-virtual-cursor.lisp, which you can find here:

http://chil.rice.edu/projects/RPM/Downloads/osx-virtual-cursor.lisp

This draws a little green cursor on MCL windows but does not affect
the real cursor.  So far in testing, this works well--standard
buttons and other clickable views respect it correctly.  There are
two caveats:  

If you use MOUSE-ENTER events, this doesn't generate them.

This requires that the window RPM is interacting with be the front
window when clicks are processed.  To guarantee this, RPM selects
the window before clicking, so if you're working in another window
it will lose focus when the model clicks.  So far I have not found
a way around this.

Email me if you have questions about this,
-Mike

===========================================================
Mike Byrne, Ph.D.                             byrne at acm.org
Assistant Professor, Psychology Department
Rice University, MS-25          http://chil.rice.edu/byrne/
6100 Main Street                      +1 713-348-3770 voice
Houston, TX  77005-1892                 +1 713-348-5221 fax