OSX Menu Mystery

[graham samuel]

On  Fri, 11 Mar 2005 14:39:31 -0800, Richard Gaskin 
<ambassador at fourthworld.com> wrote:
> If you were being "clever" like I was once, you might clone a menu
> within your group to make a new one, and wind up with something like 
> this:
>
>    File  Edit  View  Help
>
> ...but the layer order might be:
>
> 1. File
> 2. Edit
> 4. View
> 3. Help
>
> In such a case the engine will put them into the Mac menu bar as:
>
>   File Edit Help View Help
>
> ..since OS X always has a Help menu as the last one.

Ah, 'last' means in the last layer; I had not realised that the layer 
order had any meaning at all when it came to menus. I had in fact made 
exactly this mistake and got this result, but I didn't know the reason. 
Thanks for the clarification. I think the rule therefore is:

if the topmost (highest numbered) menu button in the menu group is 
called 'Help' (or presumably the equivalent in other human languages), 
then this menu gets used as the rightmost menu in OSX, and all is as 
expected. If another menu button is topmost, then that is seen by the 
IDE not to be a 'Help' menu, so it helpfully (!) adds one itself for 
OSX to use: this menu will naturally enough not contain any items which 
the developer may have put in his/her own Help menu and is therefore 
useless. Is this right?
>
>>> I was going to add my notes there, but I couldn't find the section 
>>> you
>>> refer to.  Where's the best place for me to add them?
>>
>> The only reference I could find was in Topics/Menus, where there is a
>> question:
>>
>>  How do I respond to quitting an OS X application?
>>
>> In truth this does not cover the topic of menu items being moved 
>> around
>> automagically without the developer really being able to intervene, so
>> we need a new topic - which perhaps contains the existing one - called
>> something like:
>>
>> How do I make sure my menus operate correctly under OSX?
>
> I'll drop it in the first one for now, and agree that it would be good
> to see the latter some time. Thanks.

Great!

Graham
----------------------------------------
Graham Samuel / The Living Fossil Co. / UK and France