On 16 Jun 2005, at 14:02, m wrote:
On Jun 16, 2005, at 12:50 AM, Andy Bettis wrote:
it does seem like UI has slipped from Apple's priorities. Have interface guidelines become mandatory?
Anybody else find this amusing?
The point I was trying to make is that guidelines used to be suggestions for how to improve your UI, which could be disregarded if you had a good reason for doing things differently. Apple have frowned on modal states since very early on (I remember being advised against them in the first Mac UIG manual) but have not expressly forbidden them and have provided the APIs to implement them. They have also (eventually) included ideas that third parties have come up with that were initially in violation of UI guidelines. This is in sharp contrast to the 'everything not mandatory is forbidden' approach that seems to be creeping in.
I was also referring to Apple's somewhat haphazard approach to UI in it's own apps in X, but let's not get into that.
As this sort of behaviour works fine under Carbon it looks like there has been an active decision to remove it, or at least to support it in a half-assed way.
Are you surprised that Cocoa doesn't go out of its way to support things that are proscribed by Apple's Guidelines?
I'm surprised that something that's already in place (for alerts, etc.) isn't finished off properly in accordance with the API documentation. This stuff isn't rocket science.
But anyway...
As I understand it, you are using modal dialogs to implement the "detail" part of a "master-detail" type of interface and this is leading inevitably to nested modal dialogs. Yes?
Consider implementing your "master-detail" interface in a single window like so:
That would solve your problem and give you a cleaner interface to boot.
This is just a modeless dialog stuck to the bottom of the window, as I've explained elsewhere.
Thanks for the input and advice, and I'll keep trying.
Rev. Andy