Each card can have it's own menu bar?

Hi all,

    can one have a menu bar customized for each diferent card in
aCardContainer?

    Card container seems to support shells on it, but I also need the menu
bar customizedly created for each shell. Can it have it inside the card, or
I have to detect the card in focus and modify the main menu dinamically?

    thanks,

--
Sebastián Sastre
Seaswork
Special Software Solutions
www.seaswork.com.ar

Sebastián Sastre wrote:

>     can one have a menu bar customized for each diferent card in
> aCardContainer?
>
>     Card container seems to support shells on it, but I also need the menu
> bar customizedly created for each shell. Can it have it inside the card,
> or I have to detect the card in focus and modify the main menu
> dinamically?

I don't know of any way to put the menu inside the card container, and to be
honest, I wouldn't want to know either.  An application that did that would be
very non-standard, and would probably irritate the users.  I know it would
irritate /me/ ;-)

I'm not sure that changing the menu dynamically is such a good idea either.  I
may be necessary (sometimes it is), but I think that keeping commands in fixed
positions in the menus is very important.  At least the contents of the menus
shouldn't change just because of something as small as changing the selected
tab in a window.   If at all possible, I suggest making a set of menus where
all the operations relevant to all the tabs are present, but only the ones that
are applicable to the current tab (or specific state of the current tab) are
enabled.  You may find that there are many 'generic' operations that are
applicable to more than one tab too, which would help.

If that isn't workable for you, then you'll have to rebuild the menu to reflect
the changes to the tab.  If you can keep the contents of the top-level menu
fixed then that would help the user-interface feel a bit less unstable.  It
would also mean that you could use "normal" dynamic menus to implement the
drop-down sub-menus (hooking #onAboutToDisplayMenu:).  If not then you'll have
to change the top-level menu itself.  If so then you should be aware that you
can't modify that menu, you have to build a completely new menu and replace the
old with the new.  (You can't even re-use the old menu's contents IIRC, you
have to copy them too -- I have no idea at all why that should be, but you
can't -- at least that was true the last time I tried it, which was with
Dolphin4 on Win2K).

    -- chris

> I don't know of any way to put the menu inside the card container, and to
> be
> honest, I wouldn't want to know either.  An application that did that
> would be
> very non-standard, and would probably irritate the users.  I know it would
> irritate /me/ ;-)

Well, it wouldn't happen if you don't have the perception of the change.

You made me think about this. Perhaps is better that a whole menu should be
constructed at the begining only with the appropiate commands. In such way I
don't have to care about enabling/disabling them too much.

Thanks,

--
Sebastián Sastre
Seaswork
Special Software Solutions
www.seaswork.com.ar