Re: [ 101880 ] PopupButton menu does not scroll

[Stefan Urbanek]

Hi,

This bug report/feature request reminds me something about UI desing...

On 2003-02-23 15:58:06 +0100 nobody@savannah.gnu.org wrote:

> Support Request #101880, was updated on 2003-Feb-23 15:58
> You can respond by visiting: 
> http://savannah.gnu.org/support/?func=detailsupport&support_id=101880&group_id=99
>
> Category: AppKit
> Status: Open
> Priority: 5
> Summary: PopupButton menu does not scroll
>
> By: wim
> Date: 2003-Feb-23 15:58
> Logged In: YES user_id=4090
> Browser: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.3a) Gecko/20021207 
> Phoenix/0.5
>
>
> 1 - Open Gorm.app
> 2 - Position inspector near top/bottom of the screen.
> 3 - Select item in popup button so it will fall off the
>      screen.
> 4 - Click popup button and scroll up/down notice that    you cannot select an 
> item that is off the screen.
>
>
> I am not sure what is the intuitive / correct behaviour.
> For example it could scroll up/down when the cursor
> approaches the edge of the screen.  But what to do
> with the original selected item?

I agree, that scrolling is a good idea, like it is in NSMenu. Sometimes popup 
buttos have lots of items that cannot be reached, because they are out of the 
screen (for example gnumail mailbox list or encodings popups, where it is 
sometimes not possible to pick desired option).

However, that is the case of bad user interface design. popup buttons should 
not have lots of items, combo-box or some other alternative should be used 
instead.

For futher reading see:

http://developer.apple.com/techpubs/macosx/Essentials/AquaHIGuidelines/AHIGControls/chapter_7_section_5.html

Stefan