Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!uunet!aplcen!samsung!usc!sdsu!ucsd!ucbvax!hoptoad!tim
From: tim@hoptoad.uucp (Tim Maroney)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: Popupmenu CDEF
Message-ID: <9397@hoptoad.uucp>
Date: 24 Dec 89 21:25:24 GMT
References: <3417@hub.UUCP>
Reply-To: tim@hoptoad.UUCP (Tim Maroney)
Organization: Eclectic Software, San Francisco
Lines: 38

In article <3417@hub.UUCP> 6500stom@hub.UUCP writes:
>If the selection wasn't changed in the autoTrack,
>we get a lot of flicker. Now this isn't such a terrible this except
>that I can't stand it... and I think a lot of people agree with my
>assessment of flicker.

Oh?  I doubt very many others have even noticed it.  How many people
go around clicking really fast on pop-up menu items in dialogs?  Why
would anyone do such a thing?

Now that I think about it, the "flicker" may be a good thing.  If
someone doesn't know how pop-ups work and just quickly single clicks on
one of them, then the "flicker" will at least show the user the menu --
they'll understand immediately what happens when you click on a pop-up
and that they could select something from a menu if they just held the
mouse down and dragged instead of single-clicking.  This is called
advertising your features, and it's one of the basic principles of
friendly interface design.

>The latest method works like this: my CDEF patches the TrackControl
>routine so that I can warn the draw routine not to draw. I wont
>bore you with the details but everything falls into place nicely.
>The patch isn't a tail patch and I remove the patch as soon as it
>wont be needed anymore. I conceed that this method isn't compat.
>consious as the first method put its more elegant from the programmer's
>point of view.

There are some of us who consider any trap patch inherently inelegant,
the kind of awkward maneuver one should undertake only if the goal
can't be reached any other way, and a necessary evil even then.  Given
that the patch is being used here to overcome behavior that is at worst
a very minor annoyance and at best an important way for software to
advertise its behavior to naive users, I think "elegant" is hardly the
word.  Sorry.
-- 
Tim Maroney, Mac Software Consultant, sun!hoptoad!tim, tim@toad.com

"Gorbachev is returning to the heritage of the great Lenin" - Ronald Reagan