Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!usc!bbn!bbn.com!levin
From: levin@bbn.com (Joel B Levin)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: Popupmenu CDEF
Message-ID: <50039@bbn.COM>
Date: 22 Dec 89 12:37:50 GMT
References: <3379@hub.UUCP> <9376@hoptoad.uucp>
Sender: news@bbn.COM
Reply-To: levin@BBN.COM (Joel B Levin)
Organization: BBN Communications Corporation
Lines: 34

In article <9376@hoptoad.uucp> tim@hoptoad.UUCP (Tim Maroney) writes:
|I wanted to comment on this "abusiveness" issue when someone made it
|last week, but I'm doing it now instead.  The claim is that pop-ups
|don't exhibit the itemless scrolling behavior as long as they're used
|correctly.  I must disagree strongly.  Most dialogs should be modeless
|and have drag bars.  If you do this, there is no way to allow
|legitimate dragging while preventing the pop-up from being close to the
|bottom of the screen, creating this obnoxious behavior.  Modeless
|dialogs are hardly "abusive"; if anything, modal dialogs are the
|abusive ones.  This behavior is a bug in PopUpMenuSelect, not the fault
|of application programmers.

I assume you are referring to the way popups have of allocating
sufficiently large rectangles that are mostly full of whitespace if
the top end of the menu is initially selected while being popped up at
the bottom of the screen, for example.  I agree that it is not
preventable with the current standard methods, and I'd add that it's
not necessarily a bad thing if it is required, as it seems to be now,
that (a) the mouse not be moved and (b) the programmer be allowed to
start the menu at any specified item.

As a user, I find the Suntools method much more disconcerting: If the
menu doesn't have enough room to pop up, the current mouse position is
moved _by the system_ so that there will be enough room for the menu.
This can be even worse if a hierarchical menu is invoked.  I prefer
the Mac way in this case.

My $.02.

	/JBL
=
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