I don't remember ever seeing an application where the outer frame
had one menu and inner frames had another, so you may be sailing in
uncharted waters here. You may find things much simpler if you
stick to a single menu bar, which should probably go on the outer
window.
I mostly agree with this, but for floating palettes which do have a
lot of operations specific to that palette, I sometimes put a menu
bar in the palette but with a "popup arrow" icon for the single menu.
This is similar to the UI of things like Photoshop where each palette
has a menu of operations in the top right corner.
Typically, I have each window own and manage its menu bar, so if
you go with a single outer-window menu bar, you'll need to install
a different one whenever a new internal window gains focus, but
that's pretty easy to do. This scheme works well with separate
windows and with internal windows.
What I find difficult is the problem you have with individual windows
having their own menu bar when the last window is closed. On the Mac
this is no problem because you have the screen menu bar and you still
have a File menu to allow the user to open new documents. I've had
Windows users tell me that they think this is weird - they can't
understand an application existing with no windows. On Windows, you
have a few options: MDI (yuck), exiting the application when the last
window is closed, creating an empty document and window (possibly
reusing the window when the user chooses "New" or "Open"), and having
a small window just containing the menu bar. None of these seems
particularly satisfactory to me for all cases.
Jerry
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