Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!ns-mx!iowasp!deimos!ux1.cso.uiuc.edu!uwm.edu!cs.utexas.edu!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!hoptoad!tim
From: tim@hoptoad.uucp (Tim Maroney)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: Hierarchical menus
Message-ID: <10110@hoptoad.uucp>
Date: 7 Feb 90 20:57:10 GMT
References: <14044@reed.UUCP> <1990Feb5.004034.6097@oracle.com> <28018@brunix.UUCP> <10059@hoptoad.uucp> <2857@draken.nada.kth.se>
Reply-To: tim@hoptoad.UUCP (Tim Maroney)
Organization: Eclectic Software, San Francisco
Lines: 35

In article <10059@hoptoad.uucp> tim@hoptoad.UUCP (Tim Maroney) writes:
>>Does anyone feel there are some serious ergonomic problems with the
>>Mac's hierarchical menus?  You have to do an absolutely flawless
>>horizontal drag all the way over to the menu; any slight deviation from
>>the roughly 16-bit-wide path to the menu will change items.  However,
>
>>right.  But since this is all internal to MenuSelect, I haven't been
>>able to come up with a reasonable way to write an INIT to do this.
>>There's no trap to patch, except the entirety of MenuSelect, which
>>is both unsafe and a pain.

In article <2857@draken.nada.kth.se> d88-jwa@nada.kth.se (Jon W{tte) writes:
>Sanity check needed. Right. IM volume IV or V (don't have them handy.
>V probably) clearly states that there _is_ a delay for dragging
>diagonally to hirearchical menus, as well as a delay before the
>menu actually pops up. Just tweak the right lo-mem global (or ROM
>position ? :-( ) and it will do what you want.

There is such a delay; it's far too short.  In testing, I have found
that if I don't drag the mouse in a very quick jerk (no, not John D.
Mathon), then the movement is too slow to fall within the delay time.

And no low-memory global to control the length of the delay is
documented in Inside Mac.

I think the problem may be that the delay is fixed, when it should be
proportional to the size of the submenu, because the average time to
get to a submenu item depends on the size of the submenu.
-- 
Tim Maroney, Mac Software Consultant, sun!hoptoad!tim, tim@toad.com

"But don't you see, the color of wine in a crystal glass can be spiritual.
 The look in a face, the music of a violin.  A Paris theater can be infused
 with the spiritual for all its solidity."
    -- Lestat, THE VAMPIRE LESTAT, Anne Rice