Popping up stacks

[Richard Gaskin]

Scott Rossi wrote:
 > Recently, Richard Gaskin wrote:
 >
 >>> Each of these solutions is using a stack as a menu -- is there
 >>> a reason you can't display a palette or system window at the
 >>> desired location?
 >
 >> If there's no magic combination of property settings to make
 >> either of those work, using a palette would be the next step.
 >>
 >> But this is not without its own challenges, as I'd need to carefully
 >> trap messages to dismiss the palette whenever anything else is
 >> clicked on, when the Escape key is pressed, etc.
 >
 > Well at first glance, you may not have many other options available
 > to you.

So it seems.


 > Since I assume the panel is supposed to open above another stack,
 > you could temporarily a transparent graphic in the under-stack to
 > catch all non-popup mouseclicks.

That would help for those, but then there's suspend and other messages 
that need to be trapped.


 > Are you replicating some behavior/feature in an existing application?

I'm not sure I understand the question, but I won't let that stop me 
from answering it. :)

If you mean, "Where did you see that before?", we have a few flavors.

Going way back, HyperCard had nifty tear-off menus with selection grids 
(though all controls were visible and didn't require a scrollbar).

More recently, as part of Microsoft's "Ribbons" UI in Office 12 they 
have Galleries, popup panes to select from a range of presets, sometimes 
with collections large enough to require scrolling:

<http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2005/09/19/471123.aspx>

Of course with the Mac menu bar we can't popup from there, but we can 
from a toolbar, which for this design is really what we're looking for.

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