Bad Idea To Disable an 'Edit' Menu

[Ken Ray]

On 8/20/05 11:47 AM, "Mark Wieder" <mwieder at ahsoftware.net> wrote:

> Ken-
> 
> Friday, August 19, 2005, 11:04:04 PM, you wrote:
> 
>> If your application has an 'Edit' menu AND it has a 'Preferences' menu item
>> AND you deploy to Mac OS X, then you should never disable the entire Edit
>> menu (you should leave the menu itself enabled, but individually disable the
>> items you want to prevent users from executing).
> 
> Good to know about, I guess, but are there any other applications that
> really *do* disable an entire menu? I can't think of any - I think
> it's an OS thing about disabling menu items for apps that aren't the
> frontmost app. I don't think this is a rev bug, but rather that you're
> trying to usurp an OS function by doing this.

Well, regardless of whether there are other apps that disable an entire menu
(thanks, Richard, for the HIG post, btw), the fact is that Rev allows you to
do it, and the results are inconsistent under OS X for the Edit menu (and
probably the Help menu too, I'd suspect). So either Rev shouldn't allow the
disabling of an entire menu, or it should at least be consistent, IMHO.

Ken Ray
Sons of Thunder Software
Web site: http://www.sonsothunder.com/
Email: kray at sonsothunder.com