Popup Menus with Text Selection?

Richard Gaskin ambassador at fourthworld.com
Tue Oct 12 13:41:31 EDT 2004


Frank D. Engel, Jr. wrote:
> The fourth control from the bottom of mine (depending on how you count) 
> would seem to be "Menu Items"?
> 
> I posted a screenshot of an example of my properties window (at 
> http://www.fjrhome.net/basic-image.tiff) so that you can see what I get 
> for a popup menu.  I am using 2.5 under OS X.

You're absolutely right.  My bad:  I had dropped a button onto a card to 
test this, but it seems I needed to drop a button of specifically the 
"popup menu" style in order to see the same inspector panel.

This is itself an odd nomenclature issue, as both push buttons and 
"popup menu" buttons are buttons, and there's an argument that folks 
will learn the tool more easily if this is not hidden from them.  It's 
too easy now to not know that "popup menu" buttons and all other types 
of buttons are all just buttons, with their differences being their 
style property.  Menus are buttons of style "menu", and their menuMode 
property governs which type of menu they artre ("popup", "tabbed", 
"option", "pulldown", "cascade", or "comboBox").

The style property itself does not appear to be settable from the 
Inspector for buttons of style "menu", and that style is ommitted from 
the list of available styles in the Inspector panel for all other 
buttons.  While the engine supports changing the style to and from 
"menu" the UI does not.  Admittedly it's rare that you'd want to, but it 
may aid learning to let people know that the difference is a button 
property, not that these are somehow completely different object types.

It does not appear that the subset of properties shown in the Inspector 
includes traversalOn for buttons of style "menu".

If you're making an app for cross-platform deployment that's not so bad: 
  Windows blows the pants off Mac in one regard, accessibility. 
TraversalOn allows controls to be traversed from the keyboard, and many 
Win users expect to be able to to that.  In fact, blind users require 
it, as they won't be able to click on the control and must use the tab 
and arrow keys to get around.

I came in late on this thread:  what was the reason for turning off 
traversalOn?  Maybe there's another way to handle that which won't 
cripple your Win version if you're making one.

As for properties, you can see all persistent properties of all objects, 
  edit all changeable properties, and do the same with all global 
properties with my 4W Props plugin, available in RevNet.

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Media Corporation
  ___________________________________________________________
  Ambassador at FourthWorld.com       http://www.FourthWorld.com


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