Subject: Re: non-modal dialogs (was Re: Word count nitpicks)
From: Thomas Fletcher (thomasf@qnx.com)
Date: Tue Mar 28 2000 - 14:37:26 CST
On Tue, 28 Mar 2000, Paul Rohr wrote:
> We're definitely all in consensus that having non-modal dialogs would be
> nice. However, so far we haven't come up with any XP consensus of what
> would be needed to make them work.
>
> Martin's suggestion of faking non-modal dialogs using focus tricks is
> appealing, but IIRC, that kind of approach raises a bunch of thorny
> platform-specific issues about how GUI events/messages get pumped to the
> right windows (so that updates, scrolling, redraws, etc. happen cleanly).
>
> I've seen people solve this problem before, but all I remember are their
> complaints about how nasty it was.
>
> Sorry for the FUD. I'd love to be proven wrong, but that'd require more
> platform-specific knowledge of event processing than I personally have.
Something that has been driving me bananas here too is the
way we do the flashing cursor, even if we loose focus. Try
bringing up a dialog ... note that even though the dialog
is modal, the cursor continues to flash. Now go an take
that dialog and drag it around on top of the cursor so
the cursor is half covered. Move it up and down. Now
you get this cool ... half on/half off flashing cursor.
At the very least if we had a
LoosingFocus()
GainingFocus()
callout it would give us a place to indicate that the
document was loosing focus or gaining focus and we
could turn the flashing cursor off. Now that doesn't
help with the modal dialog issue at all, but a long
time ago Jeff, Paul, Eric and I were discussing a
scheme to handle the fact that modal dialogs on BeOS
are very hard to do ... everything wants to be non-modal
since each window spawns it's own thread.
I'll see if I can dig up that discussion.
Thomas
-------------------------------------------------------------
Thomas (toe-mah) Fletcher QNX Software Systems
thomasf@qnx.com Neutrino Development Group
(613)-591-0931 http://www.qnx.com/~thomasf
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