Bad Idea To Disable an 'Edit' Menu

[Richard Gaskin]

Ken Ray wrote:
> On 8/20/05 11:47 AM, "Mark Wieder" <mwieder at ahsoftware.net> wrote:
> 
> 
>>Ken-
>>
>>Friday, August 19, 2005, 11:04:04 PM, you wrote:
>>
>>
>>>If your application has an 'Edit' menu AND it has a 'Preferences' menu item
>>>AND you deploy to Mac OS X, then you should never disable the entire Edit
>>>menu (you should leave the menu itself enabled, but individually disable the
>>>items you want to prevent users from executing).
>>
>>Good to know about, I guess, but are there any other applications that
>>really *do* disable an entire menu? I can't think of any - I think
>>it's an OS thing about disabling menu items for apps that aren't the
>>frontmost app. I don't think this is a rev bug, but rather that you're
>>trying to usurp an OS function by doing this.
> 
> 
> Well, regardless of whether there are other apps that disable an entire menu
> (thanks, Richard, for the HIG post, btw), the fact is that Rev allows you to
> do it, and the results are inconsistent under OS X for the Edit menu (and
> probably the Help menu too, I'd suspect). So either Rev shouldn't allow the
> disabling of an entire menu, or it should at least be consistent, IMHO.

But if you disable the entire menu, what happens to your Preferences 
item on Win?

Although the Win HIG says that when all of a menu's items are 
unavailable to go ahead and disable the entire menu, in the case of the 
Edit menu that's not likely to be an issue, since it's the common place 
for the Preferences item.

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  Richard Gaskin
  Managing Editor, revJournal
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