From kde-devel  Thu May 13 22:00:44 1999
From: Matthias Ettrich <ettrich () troll ! no>
Date: Thu, 13 May 1999 22:00:44 +0000
To: kde-devel
Subject: Re: Applets? [ was: Re: kde mp3 player]
X-MARC-Message: https://marc.info/?l=kde-devel&m=92663294903443

>MS Word -- Yes, I learned to hate it! 
>The worst thing for most beginners is to  find this ´special dialog´.
>I´m sure that most people won´t figure out themselves how to do this
>without help. Try it out! Ask some unexperienced person (mother,
>grandma,...
>to create an icon in the toolbar ... How many times did I tell
>people how to do it ...?
>so far Microsoft´s innovations ... so go forth and copy it *sigh*!
>
>Torsten


The trouble is that menus in today's applications are highly dynamic. Take klyx
as an example: the menu structure depends on the state of the editor. This
includes enabling/disabling of items as well as special menuitems that only
show up in a certain mode.

This is usually implemented by building the menus dynamically whenever this is
required (i.e. whenever the users wants to see them). This is both easier to
program and usually much faster.

Now, if you make popups tearable, some menus will most certainly show a wrong
state. The user will be able to select an item where the developer considered
it impossible => weird effects and even possible crashes. So tearable menus
would put another burden on the shoulders of application developers.

With a system like KAction the problems are technically solvable. _If_ it is
used everywhere, which is unlikely for the millions of  lines of existing code.

Another workaround would be to only allow tearing off menus if (a) the
developer explicitely allowed it or (b) nothing was connect to the
aboutToShow() signal. Sounds a bit hacky, though.


Matthias