Comments on: A Dim View of Menus

By: Buzz Andersen

Buzz Andersen — Wed, 02 Jun 2004 06:42:32 +0000

Man, you’re just full of ideas :-). I’ll try to suggest that to the appropriate parties as well (just as soon as I figure out who they are).

By: Daniel J. Wilson

Daniel J. Wilson — Wed, 02 Jun 2004 05:30:46 +0000

Thanks for the info! I’d wondered if it was simply that applications (Cocoa in particular) just didn’t automatically dim unavailable menu bar and sub-menu titles. Menu dimming is a small thing, but when it is done properly it can make it a lot easier to find commands that are usable at a given point. I’ll send in a comment about it as well.

Your unawareness of the dimming guidelines gives me another idea! How about HIG syndication feeds?

By: Buzz Andersen

Buzz Andersen — Wed, 02 Jun 2004 02:08:21 +0000

To answer your question about the technical aspects of menu validation, essentially the way it works for Cocoa applications is that each time through the event loop (in other words, each time an event is triggered by a mouse click or whatever), the target object for each menu item is asked whether the menu item is currently valid. This is *not* done for entire menus, however, which would explain why none of the Cocoa apps you mention actually adhere to that guideline (iTunes is a Carbon app, and Carbon apps have a different way of handling menus). It is possible to do what you’re talking about in Cocoa, it’s just not part of the “normal” way of doing things.

I never thought about it (I wasn’t aware of the guideline to be honest), but you bring up an excellent point. I’ll file a bug suggesting that Cocoa menu validation should also handle whole menus.