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From: lsr@Apple.COM (Larry Rosenstein)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: Dialog Edit menu, display of shortcuts (was: Movable-Modal WDEF)
Message-ID: <7084@goofy.Apple.COM>
Date: 8 Mar 90 23:52:21 GMT
Sender: usenet@Apple.COM
Organization: Objects-R-Us,  Apple Computer, Inc.
Lines: 25
References:<39127@apple.Apple.COM> <1831@esquire.UUCP> <10672@hoptoad.uucp>

In article <10672@hoptoad.uucp> tim@hoptoad.uucp (Tim Maroney) writes:
> I don't really think so.  I've never observed a novice even *try* to
> pull down a menu when a modal dialog is up.  It seems obvious to them
> that it wouldn't work.  So, the only people who would benefit from the
> feature are people who are at least semi-experts, people who read that

If that's true, then I don't know what you could do to make this feature 
obvious.  It seems that you would have to put individual buttons into the 
dialog for Cut, etc., or have some kind of popup Edit menu in the dialog.  

It isn't clear to me, however, that these are better alternatives to just 
making the standard Edit menu available.  Perhaps novice users would have 
to learn about the new feature the first time, but since it isn't a new 
concept, it wouldn't be much of a burden.

Graying out the unavailable menus is a good idea in general.  (MacApp does 
this automatically if none of the menu items are enabled.)  Then in modal 
dialogs where you couldn't hack in the standard Edit menu, you could gray 
out all the menus, and the concept would still be consistent.

Larry Rosenstein, Apple Computer, Inc.
Object Specialist

Internet: lsr@Apple.com   UUCP: {nsc, sun}!apple!lsr
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