Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!decwrl!ucbvax!hplabs!hplabsz!mayer From: mayer@hplabsz.HPL.HP.COM (Niels Mayer) Newsgroups: comp.windows.x Subject: Re: Wish list for R5 Message-ID: <5803@hplabsz.HPL.HP.COM> Date: 15 Aug 90 03:11:33 GMT References: <9008130225.AA21698@shamash.McRCIM.McGill.EDU> <1990Aug14.174606.1137@elroy.jpl.nasa.gov> Reply-To: mayer@hplabs.hp.com (Niels Mayer) Organization: Hewlett-Packard Labs, Software & Systems Lab, Palo Alto, CA. Lines: 40 Summary: Expires: Sender: Followup-To: In article <1990Aug14.174606.1137@elroy.jpl.nasa.gov> pjs@aristotle.jpl.nasa.gov writes: @In article , rjc@uk.ac.ed.cstr @(Richard Caley) writes: @> Thirdly, as a piece of pure fantasy, it would be wonderful if some way @> could be found of allowing resources to specify extra buttons andmenu @> items as well as changing the labels and effects of ones which exist. @> For instance I might wish to move an action from being on a menu @> behind a button to being on a button of its own. Always assuming that @> there is not some way to do this already which has escaped my @> notice... @ @If an application has been coded using Dave Smyth's Widget Creation @Library, it is often possible to achieve exactly this by changing the @resource file alone. Probably not as easily as the method you have @in mind, tho'... Yes, you could do this modulo any application-state based changes on the user-interface -- for example, if certain menu entries grey out to prevent the user from selecting the wrong thing given a certain app-state, then you need to transmit that state information to the user-defined buttons as well. Things can also get zorched if you are moving an action that would normally be called from a dialog box onto the "main window" of a program -- the application expects to be in a state of dialog, and allah-the-sudden you've popped it into doing a callback while it is in the wrong state. Both of the aforementioned problems require more than a static description of a widget hierarchy and resources as provided by UIL or WCL. By the way, An existing example of doing such resource-based customization of buttons, menus and their associated actions can be found in the r4 xmh mailer. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Niels Mayer -- hplabs!mayer -- mayer@hplabs.hp.com Human-Computer Interaction Department Hewlett-Packard Laboratories Palo Alto, CA. *