menu woes...

[Richard Gaskin]

SimPLsol at aol.com wrote:
> Jeanne,
>      Many smart people have posted to this list with stack resizing problems 
> after adding menus to a stack used on OS X. The documentation does cover how 
> menus are supposed to work. 

While doc recommendations are perhaps better served through the RevDocs 
group at Yahoo, as long as you mention it the entry point into the docs 
is a bit obscure.

Apple's Inside Macintosh series broke things into convenient groupings: 
  Menus, Windows, QuickTime, Graphics, Files, etc.

If the docs had such a topic list as the second-most-obvious thing (the 
first being a topic called "Getting Started with Revolution"), and then 
provided a good top-down description of how these elements are done in 
Rev, I think a lot of questions would go away.

There's a lot of reliance on searching the docs, but studies show search 
is rarely used, and even more rarely effectively, even in the best 
implementations (see the articles archive at uie.com).  And of course 
our collective experience suggests that the current search 
implementation in Rev could do with an expanded index (and options for 
find whole vs. find partial, etc.). ;)

There's more on this in the RevDocs list, but in short it seems things 
like this subject might be more easily learned if the docs had an entry 
path something like:

   Step 1       Step 2                   Step 3
   ------       -------                  ------
   ...
   Buttons
   Fields       ...
   Files        What is a Menu?          ...
   Graphics     Types of Menus           Using the Menu Builder
   Menus     -> Creating Menus        -> Cross-platfom Menus
   QuickTime    Responding to Messages   Mac tip: EditMenus property
   ...          Menu Properties          ...
                ...

A good taxonomy will obviate the need for most searches.  If the folks 
at DMOZ can come up with a taxonomy for everything, there must be a good 
taxonomy for the relatively small subset of things in Rev's corner of 
the universe. :)


> About six months ago I showed you a group of stacks 
> on which I was having the resizing problem; we eventually worked around it by 
> setting the stack sized specifically in an openStack handler (putting the 
> same code in the preOpenStack did not work). This is not documented.

The IT Works stacks I've seen had a different problem:  the menu group 
was sized way too large, extending below the bottom of the menu buttons 
within it.  If I recall on those stacks we set the menu group size to 
match the height of the buttons and the problem went away.

It's an unusual anomaly to have the menu group be so large.  The docs 
mention that the crop-and-scroll will crop at the bottom of the menu 
group, but it would have been almost frighteningly prescient of Jeanne 
if she included a topic for the specific circumstance you'd encountered. :)

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