Re: [Interest] Long menus on Windows
On 6/1/2013 8:24 AM, John Weeks wrote: Alex- Thank you! You seem to be the only one that takes an interest in my peculiar questions. The dialog takes extra clicks- one to select a menu item that displays the dialog, then more clicks to interact with the dialog and click OK button. I agree that huge menus aren't great; I'm not sure where the big menu gets to be big enough to counteract the drawbacks of putting up a dialog. If it's taking more than 2 columns on a 1024x768 display, it's huge, way too big. If it's filling the entire screen, that is ridiculous. By the way you can always to make your dialog function like menu. That would be cool. Can you give me a pointer to get me started? Wait- I guess there really isn't any trickiness- just a button; when you click the button, the dialog goes up posititioned at the mouse click. Any accept or reject causes the dialog to disappear. I'll think seriously about that! -John Weeks ___ Interest mailing list Interest@qt-project.org http://lists.qt-project.org/mailman/listinfo/interest ___ Interest mailing list Interest@qt-project.org http://lists.qt-project.org/mailman/listinfo/interest
Re: [Interest] Long menus on Windows
Op 31-5-2013 19:25, John Weeks schreef: We have a couple very long menus in our application (containing a list of functions in our internal programming language). On Macintosh, the menu simple runs from the top to the bottom of the screen and scrolls very quickly. On Windows, it shows as a multi-column menu that fills the monitor! Is there a way to get a single, scrolling column on Windows? A work-around would be to provide a dialog instead, with a list of functions. That requires more clicks to get to the desired item. From a UX point of view: don't do that. Don't create menus that are too big to fit on the screen. You are fooling yourself if you think that an additional mouse click translates in additional time in this case. You also need to factor in the time to actually locate the item in the menu, and the potential scrolling that takes. That will likely take an order of magnitude more time than an extra click if that means you can present the options in a more managable way. What I'd do, is a combination of two things: 1) categorize Don't present all functions in a single big list (by default), but distribute them into sane categories. 2) allow search If you present a search box, people can just type to trim down the list of functions you present. To be really friendly, match on any part of the function name, but also on a description for it. And yes, this is perfectly doable in Qt. André -- You like Qt? I am looking for collegues to join me at i-Optics! ___ Interest mailing list Interest@qt-project.org http://lists.qt-project.org/mailman/listinfo/interest
Re: [Interest] Long menus on Windows
I will try to recall what I did once. Instantiate and add subclass of QWidgetAction to the menu. Such subclass had to instantiate your widget (better not to derive it from dialog). To do this override createWidget. Such widget can be any complex or simple widget. If not mistaken I had explicitly call setAutoFillBackground(true ) in a widget constructor. You would also have to close menu yourself as a reaction on appropriate events (for example item selection) for example in your widget when user selected item you might call Q_ASSERT( parentWidget()-inherits( QMenu ) ); parentWidget() -close() Hope this helps, Alex On Fri, May 31, 2013 at 3:24 PM, John Weeks j...@wavemetrics.com wrote: Alex- Thank you! You seem to be the only one that takes an interest in my peculiar questions. The dialog takes extra clicks- one to select a menu item that displays the dialog, then more clicks to interact with the dialog and click OK button. I agree that huge menus aren't great; I'm not sure where the big menu gets to be big enough to counteract the drawbacks of putting up a dialog. By the way you can always to make your dialog function like menu. That would be cool. Can you give me a pointer to get me started? Wait- I guess there really isn't any trickiness- just a button; when you click the button, the dialog goes up posititioned at the mouse click. Any accept or reject causes the dialog to disappear. I'll think seriously about that! -John Weeks ___ Interest mailing list Interest@qt-project.org http://lists.qt-project.org/mailman/listinfo/interest
[Interest] Long menus on Windows
We have a couple very long menus in our application (containing a list of functions in our internal programming language). On Macintosh, the menu simple runs from the top to the bottom of the screen and scrolls very quickly. On Windows, it shows as a multi-column menu that fills the monitor! Is there a way to get a single, scrolling column on Windows? A work-around would be to provide a dialog instead, with a list of functions. That requires more clicks to get to the desired item. -John Weeks ___ Interest mailing list Interest@qt-project.org http://lists.qt-project.org/mailman/listinfo/interest
Re: [Interest] Long menus on Windows
Alex- Thank you! You seem to be the only one that takes an interest in my peculiar questions. The dialog takes extra clicks- one to select a menu item that displays the dialog, then more clicks to interact with the dialog and click OK button. I agree that huge menus aren't great; I'm not sure where the big menu gets to be big enough to counteract the drawbacks of putting up a dialog. By the way you can always to make your dialog function like menu. That would be cool. Can you give me a pointer to get me started? Wait- I guess there really isn't any trickiness- just a button; when you click the button, the dialog goes up posititioned at the mouse click. Any accept or reject causes the dialog to disappear. I'll think seriously about that! -John Weeks ___ Interest mailing list Interest@qt-project.org http://lists.qt-project.org/mailman/listinfo/interest
