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From: navas@cory.Berkeley.EDU (David C. Navas)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy
Subject: Re:  De-macification of the Amiga (Re: The Amiga's Future)
Message-ID: <14318@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU>
Date: 27 Jun 91 21:18:03 GMT
References: <1991Jun24.094738.29131@Sugar.NeoSoft.com> <lron.5182@easy.lrcd.com> <14300@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU> <1991Jun27.115950.24857@Sugar.NeoSoft.com>
Sender: news@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU
Reply-To: navas@cory.Berkeley.EDU
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In article <1991Jun27.115950.24857@Sugar.NeoSoft.com> peter@Sugar.NeoSoft.com (Peter da Silva) writes:
>In article <lron.5182@easy.lrcd.com> lron@easy.lrcd.com (Dwight Hubbard) writes:
>> Good explanation, but you happen to have any Idea why the damn menus are in
>> screen title bar instead of the title bar for the window were they belong??
>
>Because they don't belong either place. They should remain invisible until
>selected with the menu button, and pop up under the mouse with the last
>selected option already active.

Weeell.  That's one opinion of course.  For the beginner user (which neither of
us are) there really isn't enough visual clueing as to whether menus exist
or not.  Witness, if you will, poor Joe user confused the first time he
fires up dpaint and hits his right mouse button.

>That's not a benefit of putting the menus in the window title bar. That's a
>benefit of drawing the menus through layers.library. You could do that with
>the current menu sysyem as well. It'd just slow them down a bit.

Well, except that in the case of rendering them to the screen a layer needs
to be created.  Question: do you create a layer for each menu-item list,
or one to hold the whole bunch?, etc.  In a window, the layer already exists.

But...

>>   Problems:
>>     The window may not be large enough to display the menu.

>No problem, just use scrolling menus.

Bzzzt.  :)  What if the window isn't *wide* enough?  You won't be able to read
the text.

Scrolling isn't a bad idea, though, for the vertical problem.

>I suspect it'd be possible to write a handler like PopUpMenu that'd do
>the job. Go for it.

Sorry, I'm busy with something else right now. :)

Also, there are some serious intuition-type conflicts that I'm not convinced
PopUpMenu has solved.

The menu system on the Amiga sucks.  I think the folks at Cmdre know that, its
a matter of allocation of resources.  Certainly it seemed to be one of jimm's
laments, although I think he seemed to be dreading attacking the problem. :)

[Intuition's state machine was already broken....]

David Navas                                   navas@cory.berkeley.edu
	2.0 :: "You can't have your cake and eat it too."
Also try c186br@holden, c260-ay@ara and c184-ap@torus