h.g. muller wrote:
It is traditional windows logic to use the buttonup event for actions.
Go to any menu in any program and downclick only but don't release
the mouse. Nothing happens until you release the mouse. If you
change your mind about the action, you simply move away the mouse
from the item and then release.
That's why the buttonup event is used-- so you can change your mind
on misclicks.
OK, I see the logic, and indeed the right-click menu in NotePad
behaves that way.
But left-clicking the menu bar of mmost programms I tried, including
NotePad,
the pull-down menus appear on the down-click. And you can select an
item there
on the corresponding up-click, if you move there. If not, the menu
says open until
a second click. So Windos users are not entirely unfamiliar with this
behavior.
I did some testing on context menus with various programs to see how
they implement it. It seems most of them use the UP event (all that I
tested actually, including programs I've written), and I was able to
change my mind by moving outside the application window before release.
Moving to the application's title bar caused the normal system context
menu, so the only way to prevent it, it seems, is to move outside the
window you started in. That behavior seems reasonable to me, and it's
very standard.
I see the logic of what you want to do also. I tend to err on the side
of familiarity in these cases. But I don't think it would be a big
problem to do it the way you suggest.
If the 'action' is opening a menu, this logic seems a bit
over-cautious. I could even
make an up-click outside the menu immediately pop it down, so that the
logic
down-move-up to cancel the action fully applies. People that like the
meu to stay
up after a full click could simply define an empty menu position under
the mouse
pointer, and an up-click there would then be ignored and keep the menu
open.
On a completely unrelated note, I got irritated enough at my email
program's inability to recognize this list that I went and found an
addon that lets it automatically reply to the list instead of the
author. I don't know if other people have had this problem, but a large
percentage of the time I reply to the list, it goes to the author
because I forget to modify the recipient.
