stack menu

[Peter Brigham MD]

On Feb 16, 2010, at 12:40 AM, Richard Gaskin wrote:

> Peter Brigham MD wrote:
>
>> I'm already adjusting the height of the stack and placing the
>> "menuItem" groups appropriately, thanks. I was hoping to scroll the
>> whole stack. Putting everything into a group and scrolling the group
>> was what I was hoping to avoid.
>
> Moreover, AFAIK it's not possible anyway, since stacks popped up  
> with the popup command only trap one mouse click and then close --  
> regardless of what was clicked on.  Given their original purpose, to  
> hold only menu item buttons, that makes sense.  But attempting  
> manipulate controls like scrollbars will be an exercise in  
> frustration:  click on the scrollbar to drag it, and the window goes  
> away.

Yes, I thought this was the basic problem.

> You could work around that by not using the popup command, but  
> instead using a simple borderless palette and watching events  
> carefully (very carefully; popup controls are simple for users  
> because whatever system that implements them is working hard to  
> deliver that seeling seamlessness).
>
> Much better to see this fixed.

I agree. I'm not going to try a complex work-around for this.

> As for your gallery, I wonder if it might make sense to have only a  
> subset of options available, with an item for "More..." which opens  
> a dialog with a scrolling region to show all of them.  This may even  
> be a benefit to the end user, since it starts them off with with a  
> focused subset.  Of course the usefulness of that depends on a lot  
> of things I don't know about your app; maybe something to consider,  
> maybe not.

I'll probably run with something like that.

>> Hmmmm. Can you scroll a group with the scrollwheel using a rawkeydown
>> handler if the group has no scrollbar? With or without a frontscript?
>> That at least would *look* like a regular menu.
>
> Yep: rawKeyDown 65308 is "down" and 65309 is "up".

Yes, I put this in the stack script and it works fine with the stack  
at toplevel. What I may do is have a "more..." menuitem/button at the  
bottom of the popup list when the list gets long, and use that to  
toplevel the stack so it can be scrolled.

Thanks for all of your suggestions, everyone.

-- Peter

Peter M. Brigham
pmbrig at gmail.com
http://home.comcast.net/~pmbrig