menu woes...

[Richard Gaskin]

Mark Wieder wrote:
> As far as I know, there's no easy way out. Menuing is just broken. You
> have a choice: have extra blank space at the top of your Windows app;
> do without OSX system menus; or have two separate builds.

There's another option:  identify the root cause of the issue and
correct it.

Menuing is not broken, at least not in any way that necessarily prevents
anyone from delivering an experience that substantially meets user 
expectations on all supported platforms.  Best of all, 99% of the time 
it's just a case of setting one property (the menugroup propery of the 
stack) and it's all automatic.

In Chipp's case he has a very effective but slightly "non-standard" 
interface, in which he has controls for his main window in the menubar 
region.  That works really well on Windows, Linux, BSD, and pretty much 
all operating systems except Mac. It's not a bad design (talking with 
him it sound pretty nifty), but it's not how most apps are built so the 
automatic behaviors the engine does for Mac should not apply.

But you have control over those behaviors, so even in that rare case the 
solution wasn't difficult to implement once the nature of the problem 
was understood:  the editMenus stack property governs the normal 
crop-and-scroll behavior on Mac and is off by default.  Setting that 
property to true prevents the behavior desired in most cases, allowing 
even nifty UIs like Chipp's to work as well as any other.  To prevent 
his menus from appearing in both the window and the Mac menu bar, he 
simply hides that group when the platform is "MacOS".  Total cost to his 
project for suppporting the exact menu design he wants:  two lines of 
script.

Aside from the relatively small subset of cases affected by Bug #744 
(thank you Jacque for taking the time to discern and document the root 
cause, and thanks in advance to RunRev for addressing it), I haven't 
seen a menu issue yet that couldn't be resolved once the nature of the 
issue is known.

So if you encounter any menuing issues that don't fit the recipe 
described in Bug #744, please do as Chipp did: post it here, folks will 
look it over and provide a recommendation for a solution.

I can't guarantee that there may not be other issues not yet known, and 
of course identifying them and providing a recipe in Bugzilla is the 
best way to see them resolved.  But I have high confidence that most 
issues with menus can be resolved in just a few posts to this list.

I didn't always feel this way, as some of my whingeing emails to Scott 
Raney could attest.  But his patience and that of Kevin Miller and 
others when I was cutting my teeth on the engine helped me understand 
Rev menuing better, and I've come to appreciate its simplicity and 
flexibility.

Carpe menus!

--
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Media Corporation
  __________________________________________________
  Rev tools and more: http://www.fourthworld.com/rev