On Jul 17, 2012, at 21:44 , Graham Cox wrote: > The particular thing that's bothering me the most is that I have a > source-list outline view in my floating palette, and it responds to the > window activation state even though for the floating panel it's meaningless. > I'd rather it didn't and appeared always active.
There are 3 states for enabled controls**, not two: 1. In an inactive window (Snow Leopard+ at least -- I think the appearance was different in Leopard), controls are colorless with a lighter shade of gray textured background (just like the title bar is a lighter shade of gray). List and text selections are gray. 2. In a main, non-key window, controls are colorless and a darker shade of gray background, again similar to the title bar. List and text selections are gray, though I can't tell if it's the exactly the same gray as #1. 3. In a key window, controls are colored, if they have a non-gray color. This includes list and text selections for example. You can see these distinctions in TextEdit, if you open 2 document windows and the Fonts panel. (Look at the font size popup in the window toolbars. If you click in the font size field in the panel, you'll see #1 and #2 in the window toolbar popups.) All this is according to HIG AFAICT. It would seem that floating panels ought to follow the #2 and #3 rule. It's not clear that "window activation state" is meaningless. A user should be able to see, for example, whether the up and down arrows move the selection in the source list in the panel or not. The problem is, perhaps, that you've been using Macs for too long. :) Your brain is used to thinking of gray controls as inactive/disabled, whereas gray currently just encompasses everything non-key. The HIG has changed on this subject over the years (although I believe the 3 active states have been described for quite a while), plus the fact that many apps haven't followed the HIG, especially in custom controls (and perhaps standard controls didn't all draw according to all the rules pre-Snow Leopard). I also suspect, though I don't know, that the correctness of the activation has some relationship with accessibility. You might be degrading the accessibility behavior if you try to force the panels to look key when they're not. FWIW. ** I don't know how many states there are for disabled controls. There might be 2 -- in active and inactive windows, using lighter and darker textured backgrounds, but I'd have to hunt around for an app that demonstrates this. I couldn't see a way of disabling any of TextEdit's toolbar controls, and I'm not sure what other apps to trust to follow the HIG. _______________________________________________ Cocoa-dev mailing list (Cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com) Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list. Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: https://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to arch...@mail-archive.com
