add menu-background vanishes

Richard Gaskin ambassador at fourthworld.com
Mon Sep 26 17:09:11 EDT 2005


Ken Ray wrote:
> On 9/26/05 1:39 PM, "Dom" <mcdomi at free.fr> wrote:
>>Anyway, I found a no-brainer way: I always put my menus in a *substack*!
>  
> That's great advice, Dom, but it's also Mac-only advice... for those of us
> needing to deploy cross-platform, we can't use substacks (unfortunately).

True - worth reviewing:

Microsoft Human Interface Guidelines:
<http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnwue/html/part3.asp>

OS X HIG:
<http://developer.apple.com/documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/OSXHIGuidelines/index.html>

Mac Classic HIG:
<http://developer.apple.com/documentation/mac/HIGOS8Guide/thig-2.html>

(HIGs for Gnome, KDE, Motif, and more at:
<http://www.fourthworld.com/resources/index.html>)


It's possible to make mistakes with menus (and buttons and fields and 
standalone generation and OS integration and file I/O and just about 
everything a general programming language will let you do), and most of 
us have made at least a few mistakes in our day (I've made thousands).

But after you make a mistake you recognize as such, learn from it, do it 
right, and move on.

Rev could spend a million years and still not produce the world's first 
programming system in which it's not possible to make mistakes.

But in the meantime there's so much more we could be building by just 
solving the problem at hand with what we've learned and moving forward 
to the next challenge.

The automatic behavior of menus may be a bit tricky to get oriented to, 
but after you've shipped a dozen cross-platform apps with it you'll sing 
it's praises.  Maybe even after your first app.

It's not so difficult to use once you learn a very small number of 
things needed to use it effectively, and it saves you TONS of time in 
trying to write forked code to get the same HIG-compliant behavior on 
your own.

It takes faaaaaaaaaar more time to learn what those HIG-compliant 
behaviors are.  Coding for them in Rev is the easy part. :)

--
  Richard Gaskin
  Managing Editor, revJournal
  _______________________________________________________
  Rev tips, tutorials and more: http://www.revJournal.com



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