Re: [Q} Changing help key behavior
Re: [Q} Changing help key behavior
- Subject: Re: [Q} Changing help key behavior
- From: Eric Gorr <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 1 Nov 2010 16:57:10 -0400
On Nov 1, 2010, at 4:07 PM, Bill Cheeseman wrote:
>
> On Nov 1, 2010, at 2:52 PM, Eric Gorr wrote:
>
>> When I press the Help Key on the keyboard, my keyDown: method is not called and I would like it to be as I need to do something custom.
>>
>> Right right, when I press the help key, the cursor changes to a question mark.
>>
>> Anyone know how to override the default behavior of the help key?
>
>
> If I remember correctly (and this is going back several years), the Help key on most Mac keyboards is sort of hard wired to produce the question-mark cursor, and it was originally intended to invoke routines in, I think, NSHelpManager that allowed you to present super-tooltips. They looked just like the yellow tooltips we all know and love today, but you could add images and lots of other things to them. Nobody every used them in Mac OS X applications that I know of, but I devoted a whole chapter of "Mac OS X Recipes for Mac OS X -- The Vermont Recipes (first edition 2003) to how to do it.
>
> This facility is so little used that recent U.S. keyboards have renamed the Help key to something else. Oh yeah, there it is: "fn" on my latest extended keyboard, duplicating the function of the "fn" key on in the lower left corner of MacBook keyboards.
>
> I don't recall that there was any way to override what the Help key does, but I could be wrong. Maybe I even explained how to do it in the first edition of my book.
Thanks.
Upon some further investigation, the window does get a keyUp event with the NSHelpKeyMask modifier flag set. So, I can detect this, a launch a custom help application (based on AdobeAIR). When I switch back, there is a cursor flicker as the question mark cursor shows up again briefly and then switches back to the arrow cursor. Obviously, this is not quite optimal and I would like a way to prevent the question mark cursor from appearing at all.
Any chance you (or someone else) could check the first edition of your book?
Thanks.
_______________________________________________
Cocoa-dev mailing list (email@hidden)
Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list.
Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com
Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription:
This email sent to email@hidden