wscomalo@svbs01.bs.win.tue.nl (Malo Hautus) (06/28/91)
The volatility of menus is sometimes inconvenient. The possibility in RISC OS to use 'adjust' instead of 'select' improves this somewhat, but even then you can only perform menu selections or the menu will disappear. Therefore I was quite pleased with the method used in !Revelation, where a menu becomes permanent as soon as it is dragged. It then gets a close and a back icon, and it stays on the screen until it is closed or if the same menu is opened again via the menu button. (One can turn this facility off if one prefers the standard menu action.) I liked this so much that I think that it would be a good idea if a similar facility would be built in, in a future version of RISC OS (RISC OS 4?). For instance, if you drag a menu using 'adjust' the menu should become permanent. Further selections in the menu should give a 'Menu Select' message on Wimp_Poll. Applications should have the possibility to turn this action off by means of a flag. A complication is that there may be several menus open simultaneously, and that permanent menus may have to be redrawn if the selection possibilities change. Probably something like a Wimp_RedrawMenu would be needed. But it would be worth it. The same facility should of course also exist for dialogue boxes that are leaves of menus. Often I type in the name of a file in a save box, only to find out that the desired filer window isn't open yet. I suppose this happens to most of us. Malo Hautus