Archive for July 10, 2005

Sunday, July 10, 2005

Making Gear Pop-up Menus

New Apple engineer Corbin Dunn posted a tip for how to create pop-up menus that emanate from the “action” button, as seen in the Finder and Mail. However, it looks to me like his method will cause the menu to pop-up on mouse-up rather than mouse-down. So, when I add an action button to my app, I’ll probably use a subclass so that the button can respond to the mouse click earlier.

“untitled” vs. “Untitled”

The Cocoa-Dev mailing list has an interesting discussion of how to name untitled windows. Apple’s guidelines have long recommended “untitled” for reasons explained in the thread, however cross-platform applications from Adobe and Microsoft haven’t followed this guideline, and neither does Cocoa’s NSDocument class. Apple’s Ali Ozer says that rather than fix NSDocument, the guidelines should be changed, and he provides some necessary, but I think not sufficient, evidence that this is a good idea. Kudos to Apple for thinking this through years ago, and to today’s Mac developers for caring.

The Press and Privilege

Matt Deatherage:

These reporters are asking for absolute, unquestionable control over information up to and including sensitive national security matters—if they feel like revealing it, they will; if they don’t, you can’t make them. If they’re not going to accept the oversight of the courts in even the most extreme cases (like this one), then they have to accept the same kind of punishment that affects members of other privileged professions if they ever break confidentiality.

Otherwise, reporters truly would be above the law. That can’t be good for society.