reordering lists

[Jacqueline Landman Gay]

On Tuesday, February 26, 2002, at 03:18 AM, Ken Ray wrote:

>> It seems that a revolution listfield (with "autohilite" "listbehaviour" 
>> +
>> "click to toggle" checkboxes all true) wants to scroll the hilited line 
>> to
>> the vertical centre of the field, at all times, and of course that's
> really
>> undesirable here, I want it to stay where it was when I clicked it, 
>> unless
>> I'm actually dragging and the field needs to scroll to bring other lines
>> into view, which is what I'm used to in HC, windowscript, and in fact all
>> other mac apps that let you 'peel off' a line from a scrolling field.
>>
>> Sigh... if I anybody knows a way to subvert this "feature"...
>
> I'm glad you brought this up. I ran into the same behavior in attempting 
> to
> create a table object. I would sincerely recommend that Rev/MC change this
> "feature" so that it only scrolls if the hilite is at the bottom or top of
> the field.

The behavior is in the engine, and Scott Raney and I have had a couple of 
conversations about it. I don't know of any other application on any 
platform that pops a selected line to the middle the way MC/Rev does. It 
is hugely disorienting to the user. The way the Control Browser in MC 
bounces around has always made me crazy, and I talked Scott into changing 
the script in the 2.4.2 browser to block the behavior -- but it still 
remains in the engine and we have to work around it in our scripts.

I think the engine should eliminate the behavior entirely. Scott's 
argument is that it is necessary in order for the Control Browser to 
display the right line when a user clicks on an object in the stack window,
  but I think that behavior could be easily controlled by a script rather 
than by the engine. The disadvantages of auto-centering a selected line in 
almost all user applications far outweigh the small advantages that occur 
within the development environment.

--
Jacqueline Landman Gay         |     jacque at hyperactivesw.com
HyperActive Software           |     http://www.hyperactivesw.com