Re: Why is NSPopUp broken in drop-down mode?
Re: Why is NSPopUp broken in drop-down mode?
- Subject: Re: Why is NSPopUp broken in drop-down mode?
- From: Quincey Morris <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 1 Oct 2010 10:17:44 -0700
On Oct 1, 2010, at 09:37, G S wrote:
> "Pull-down controls are intended to be filled with commands. They do
> not behave like popup controls. If you want the popup behavior, you
> must have the popup appearance."
>
> You mean APPLE'S pop-up behavior. The up/down decision should have
> nothing to do with any other operational mode of the control. Forcing
> developers to accept a control that might extend a list upward is just
> bad design. It's also inconsistent with Apple's own combo-box
> behavior, which drops down and doesn't insist that contents be
> "commands". I have a dialog with plenty of non-essential space BELOW
> the multiple-choice control. Therefore I want the control to drop
> DOWN, as developers have been able to dictate in other platforms' UIs
> for decades.
You're missing a couple of points here:
1. There isn't a *universal* concept of a popup control that various platforms implement. If there's any similarity across platforms, it's because they all steal ideas from each other, but each platform implements its controls in its own way. An appeal to cross-platform consistency won't get you anywhere.
2. There's really no up/down decision involved. For popup menus in Mac OS, the point is to have the menu appear so as to put the currently selected item under the mouse pointer -- so that if the the user accidentally lets go of the mouse button there's no danger of selecting a different item. That means some awkward positioning with scrolling menus near the screen edges -- a genuine defect in the Mac OS design that is outweighed by the other usability issues.
3. Apart from #2 (and possibly other special situations I'm not considering), menus in Mac OS generally drop down. That includes menu-bar menus, pull-down controls and combo boxes, as you already noted. Note that for pull-down behavior, the opposite of #2 is desirable -- you *don't* want any menu item (other than the "title" item) under the mouse pointer, because the menu items are intended to be commands and you don't want any command to be executed if the user accidentally lets go of the mouse button.
So, yes, it's Apple's pop-up behavior. It's not so much that you're being forced to accept a behavior you might (validly) hate, but that you're being asked to accept the set of behaviors used by all applications on the Mac OS platform.
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