Menu woes

[Frank Leahy]

On Dec 30, 2004, at 5:00 PM, use-revolution-request at lists.runrev.com 
wrote:

> From: Richard Gaskin <ambassador at fourthworld.com>
> Subject: Re: Menu woes
> To: How to use Revolution <use-revolution at lists.runrev.com>
> Message-ID: <41D4278D.6010701 at fourthworld.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
>
> Frank D. Engel, Jr. wrote:
>> I suspect the easiest way to "fix" the menu issue and maintain some of
>> the current flexibility would be:
>>
>> 1. Keep the system as it is, for the most part.
>> 2. When using a group as the Mac menu bar, do not scroll the stack.
>> 3. When using a group as a menubar in the window, scroll and enlarge 
>> the
>> stack.  Now the rect of the card (for ex.) would have a negative 
>> minimum
>> vertical coordinate, since the menus would stop before reaching zero.
>>
>> Of course, this would break backward compatibility somewhat, but not
>> nearly so much as some of the other proposals, and yet this would fix
>> some of the other problems which have been mentioned here...
>
> I don't understand:  as I read that it seems to suggest that all we do
> is switch the scrolling from Mac to all other OSes, so that instead of
> the scroll taking place on 2.4% of computers it takes place on 97.6%.
>
> Remember that having the menubar be part of the window rather than
> detached is how every modern OS works except Mac.  We could debate the
> efficacy of that (Tog has a lot to say in favor of a detached menu 
> bar),
> but it won't likely change how Windows, GNOME, KDE, X11, and all other
> non-Mac windowing systems work.

Having the menu area a separate section of the stack, just like the 
window title is, would solve the problem.  No scrolling problems, no 
resizing problems.

By the way, Tog did that "research" he keeps talking about at Apple 
pre-1986 (when I got there), on a 9 1/2 inch original Mac screen.  His 
results aren't applicable to 1) larger screens, 2) multiple monitors, 
or 3) doing fine detail work in programs such as photoshop which use 
tearoff menus to advantage, allowing you to move the menu close to the 
area you're working in.

-- Frank