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 protected]) 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: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to [email protected]
