Re: [Adobe-source-devel] ASL and menus

[Ralph T. <ra...@gm...>]

From an implementation perspective menus need to either:

 a) be tied to windows
 b) be tied to the application (or main window)

On Windows there isn't much difference between the approaches (except
that some kinds of windows should be given the menu), but on MacOS it
would be bad to have the menubar change when switching focus between
two windows in the same application. From a GUI usability perspective
it's better to only have one drop-down menu in an application, so (b)
seems like a good bet.

We could add a "document" window type, and have it automatically get
the menu defined for the application on Windows. On MacOS the
application menu could show when there are no windows for that
application (like with Grab).

Ralph

On Apr 2, 2005 4:08 PM, David Catmull <unc...@un...> wrote:
> How much thought has gone into using ASL for creating and managing
> menus? It seems like a logical extension to the current work with
> dialogs. I really like the idea of using sheets to enable and disable
> menu items.
> 
> My main question is, how would it handle changing the user focus? It
> seems like each focusable object would have a dictionary of values, and
> the sheet would be updated to point to the appropriate dictionary when
> the focus changes. But I haven't learned enough about Adam yet to take
> this idea much farther than that initial concept.
> 
> Example: the enabled state of the Undo command would be tied to whether
> there is anything to undo, or more technically, if the size of the
> current focus' undo stack is greater than zero.
> 
> This all reminds me a lot of Cocoa bindings. Is this coincidental, or
> were bindings an influence in the design of ASL?
> 
> --
> David Catmull
> unc...@un...
> http://www.uncommonplace.com/