Option Menus (and missing features)

[Richard Gaskin]

Good list, Paul.

Option controls are a fundamental control type common to all desktop OSes.

I believe it helps current developers impress their audience and LC to 
impress potential new customers to make sure fundamentals work as expected.

I would add to that list the things users commonly expect from option 
controls in terms of keyboard navigability:

https://quality.livecode.com/show_bug.cgi?id=8636
https://quality.livecode.com/show_bug.cgi?id=5512
https://quality.livecode.com/show_bug.cgi?id=13068
https://quality.livecode.com/show_bug.cgi?id=5513

I've been dinged for these by clients, customers, and reviewers.  When I 
tell clients it's a LiveCode issue that has been reported (I don't draw 
attention to some of these having been reported more than a decade ago), 
they suggest using something that handles common controls better.  At 
least one of the projects on which I delivered substandard option 
controls was later rewritten in VB.

I understand and appreciate the challenges involved in anything 
dependent on mapping multiple OS APIs for event handling to the 
luxuriously comfortable world of LC we enjoy.  But I trust the core team 
appreciates the value of having common controls meet common expectations.


For the sake of completeness, here's a minor aesthetic issue apparently 
limited to Linux:
https://quality.livecode.com/show_bug.cgi?id=11676


PS: About the only item in your list I'm ambivalent about is the 
importance of having disabled items in option controls.  While anything 
that makes our work as xplat devs easier is of course welcome, only 
macOS recommends doing that at all.  The other 89% of the world is using 
OSes that explicitly suggest in their HIGs to simply remove items from 
option controls that are not relevant in a given context, and those OSes 
provide no support for rendering disabled items in those controls.

So while it would make LC dev's lives easier, the rest of the world has 
managed to deliver excellent software without them.

--
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Systems



Paul Dupuis wrote:
> There have been a few email list threads recently about some long
> standing bugs/enhancements that it would be nice, in
> Post-Infinite-LiveCode world, to finally get fixed in a forth coming
> version of LC.
> 
> I'd like to nominate to move to the top part of any list, support for
> menu meta characters (for divider lines, disabled items, check marks,
> menu tags, key equivalents, etc.) support in "menus" other than pulldown
> menus. For me, I have a burning desire to see the ability to have
> dividers "-" in *Option Menus*
> 
> A search of the Quality Center revealed these related bugs (and I am
> sure I missed some)
> https://quality.livecode.com/show_bug.cgi?id=5478 (2007-10-23)
> https://quality.livecode.com/show_bug.cgi?id=9271 (2010-12-29)
> https://quality.livecode.com/show_bug.cgi?id=9509 (2011-04-18)
> https://quality.livecode.com/show_bug.cgi?id=9871 (2011-11-14)
> https://quality.livecode.com/show_bug.cgi?id=17611 (2016-05-10)
> 
> All are in one way or another about supporting various pulldown menu
> meta character features on Option Menus (and other menu types like
> PopUps, etc.)
> 
> Any chance LiveCode might consider consolidating these and makes these
> improvements in a 9.x release in the not to distant future?