In MC, we are allowed to manipulate text selections from menu items, but
attempts to make a text palette or dialog for this fail: MetaCard
deselects text in non-focused windows.
Ostensibly, this design decision was made to prevent the impossible: How
can you have two controls, each in a difference window, each with the
focus?
Mac OS answers this with an alternative text selection to indicate to the
user that text is selected but not currently editable: instead of the
inverted appearance of text which has focus, non-focused text selections
are indicated with an outline of the selection region. UNIX has a
different set of rules and therefore different methods of resolving this,
and according to Tog, Windows is not even a GUI and can therefore be
summarily dismissed from the discussion. ;)
But even if we are talking about supporting a paradigm of a single OS,
and fully recognizing the challenges of making platform-specific things
in a multi-platform tool, this particular item is so critical that it
makes a great many application designs impossible. No font attribute
dialogs, no font settings palletes, no text linking tools, none of the
many, many things which would make useful, if not essential, additions to
our applications.
So: anyone find a way around this? Anyone successfully implement a
palette or dialog which indicates for the user the section of text about
to be affected by the controls in another window?
- Richard Gaskin
Fourth World
Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web
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