Determining which menu button was clicked on Mac

[Trevor DeVore]

On Jan 8, 2004, at 12:12 AM, Mark Wieder wrote:

> Trevor-
>
> Hmmm. I think a more "standard" way of dealing with this is to have
> both "Play" and "Pause" menuItems, one of which is grayed out at any
> given time. This works for me in a menuPick handler - initially
> "Pause" is disabled, then when the user selects "Play" the enabled and
> disabled options are switched. I also think it gives the user more of
> a sense of continuity than menu items that appear and disappear.

Normally I would agree with you for menu items but for playing/pausing 
audio I think it makes more sense to toggle the menu item.  My 
reasoning is that this mimics what QuickTime Player/a player object 
already do.  If you click the play button it toggles to pause or you 
press the space bar to toggle between play/pause.  My menu item will 
have one shortcut key that acts similar to the space bar.  I see this 
as being similar to checking/unchecking a menu item, but for sake of 
clarity I am changing the actual menu item text.

The other problem is that the play/pause state of the controller can 
change when the user clicks on the player object play/pause button.  As 
far as I can tell there is no way to detect that they did this short of 
polling the player object every x seconds to determine the current 
state which I prefer not to do in this case.  So even if I did add a 
"Play" and "Pause" menuItem I would still need to detect the state of 
the player object before displaying the menu to the user to determine 
which menu item to grey out.

-- 
Trevor DeVore
Blue Mango Multimedia
trevor at mangomultimedia.com