On Sat, 2007-09-22 at 21:16 -0400, Jacob Beauregard wrote: > forgot the image.. hope that 83kb won't kill anyone's inbox.
FWIW, the equivalent control on OS X behaves the same way (apart from the big space at the bottom). Personally I suspect that consistency offered by this behaviour probably *is* the right thing to do, on balance, even if it does require the user to do a bit of extra work when it pops up near the edge of the screen. Having said that (and I remember this discrepancy from the last time we talked about combo boxes), GNOME 2.18 on my Solaris machine doesn't do what you're seeing at all-- it adjusts the position of the popup downwards to fit the screen, so the immediately-selected item isn't the currently-selected item. I still don't know why we're seeing different behaviours. Assuming what you're seeing is the standard behaviour, I suppose you could also split the popup into multiple columns rather than just hiding the rest of the options, which would allow you to maintain the position of the currently-selected item under the cursor: ------+---------------+---------------+------ <- Top edge of screen +--| Option 1 | Option 3 |---+ | | Option 2 | Option 4 | | * = existing selection | | | Option 5* | | | +---------------+---------------+ | | Cancel OK | +--------------------------------------+ The position of the other column(s) would depend on which edge of the screen the popup abutted, e.g. if there were too many options below Option 5 to fit without hitting the bottom, they would be shown in another column to the right. Not particularly attractive though, and obscures parts of the screen (including, most likely, the control's label) that you might want to see while making your selection. Cheeri, Calum. -- CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer Sun Microsystems Ireland mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] GNOME Desktop Group http://ie.sun.com +353 1 819 9771 Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems _______________________________________________ Usability mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/usability
