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Mac Forum / Programming / CodeWarrior / June 2005Menu disabling in Tiger
After switching to Tiger, I cannot get a menu (as opposed to a menu item) to disable in my PPx app, i.e., to appear "ghosted out". It was my understanding that the menu "autodisable" option in IB was supposed to do this and, in 10.3.9, it did. Now, it does not. Even manually diabling menus does not ghost them out although it does make them stop working. Can anyone shed any light on this? In my app, there are entire menus that are sometimes inappropriate and they need to show up as disabled to comply with the standard user experience. Thanks. -- Mike McLaughlin > After switching to Tiger, I cannot get a menu (as opposed to a menu > item) to disable in my PPx app, i.e., to appear "ghosted out". The term is "dimmed." > It was > my understanding that the menu "autodisable" option in IB was supposed > to do this and, in 10.3.9, it did. Now, it does not. Even manually > diabling menus does not ghost them out although it does make them stop > working. Have you tried invalidating the menu bar to force a redraw? > Can anyone shed any light on this? In my app, there are entire menus > that are sometimes inappropriate and they need to show up as disabled to > comply with the standard user experience. I'd post questions like this to Apple's carbon-dev list, where the relevant engineer often hangs out. I tend to use this forum for CW issues, no Mac development issues like this. Sounds like a bug to me and I'd file it in Radar, but someone on the carbon-dev list may have some useful thoughts. Larry > After switching to Tiger, I cannot get a menu (as opposed to a menu > item) to disable This was covered in the 10.4 release notes which you can read here: http://developer.apple.com/releasenotes/Carbon/HIToolbox.html Here's a clip for you: The Aqua Human Interface Guidelines for Mac OS X 10.4 have changed in regard to the enabling of menu titles. Previous guidelines recommended that a menu title be disabled if all items in the menu are disabled. The new guidelines instead recommend that menu titles should always be enabled, to indicate that the menu is always browseable, even if all items in the menu are disabled. To support this new guideline, we have made these changes: - menu titles are always drawn with an enabled appearance, even if the menu title (item 0) of the menu is disabled - the kMenuAttrAutoDisable menu attribute no longer has any effect; the title of a menu with this attribute is no longer disabled automatically if all items in the menu are disabled - the Menu Manager no longer sends kEventMenuEnableItems events at idle time to menus in the menubar (although this may return in the future once we support tear-off menus, which will require idle-time enabling). Note that it is still possible to explicitly disable a menu's title using DisableMenuItem(menu, 0), and that this will still affect the availability of the menu items in the menu for purposes such as command key matching. Disabling the menu title is still a legitimate way to quickly disable all of the items in the menu, and the items will still be drawn with a disabled appearance; only the menu title will be drawn enabled. >> After switching to Tiger, I cannot get a menu (as opposed to a menu >> item) to disable > This was covered in the 10.4 release notes which you can read here: Oops. I forgot about that. Hadn't read it in a while and I'm still using Panther. Larry Thanks for passing this on. I had not seen it. IMHO, this change is for the worse. Dimming is/was supposed to convey information to the user. In my app, it conveys the fact that some choice categories exist but are inappropriate for the data file input. In my case, there are so many options (models) available (currently, about 70) that they are partitioned by menu, submenu then item. However, not all models are valid for all datasets. Here, at the top (menu) level, there are Equation, Continuous and Discrete menus, all mutually exclusive. Were they implemented as submenus, there would be too many hierarchical levels for a user to traverse (very messy and error-prone). >>After switching to Tiger, I cannot get a menu (as opposed to a menu >>item) to disable [quoted text clipped - 31 lines] > be drawn with a disabled appearance; only the menu title will be drawn > enabled. > IMHO, this change is for the worse. Dimming is/was supposed to convey > information to the user. It does, and therein lay the problem. Dimming conveys that something is disabled and won't respond to clicks, as with a dimmed push button, popup button, radio button, and so on. Menus with dimmed titles would respond to clicks and open the menu, which was inconsistent with the behavior of other interface elements. > In my app, it conveys the fact that some > choice categories exist but are inappropriate for the data file input. Understood. You could try adding and removing menus as appropriate instead of disabling and enabling them. Larry |
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