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Active select


| Date: Wed, 21 Oct 92 15:35:56 PDT
| From: york%oakland-hills@lucid.com (Bill York)
| Reply-To: York@lucid.com
| 
|    Date: Tue, 20 Oct 1992 18:04-0400
|    From: Scott McKay <SWM@stony-brook.scrc.symbolics.com>
| 
|        Date: Tue, 20 Oct 1992 17:10 EDT
|        From: Brian Anderson <bha@atc.boeing.com>
| 
|        I would like to augment the presentation translator for the select
|        gesture.  Consider the following.  I have a command with one argument.
|        When the argument for that command is being accepted (after mousing on
|        the menu item for the command), I would like the select translator to
|        *activate* the command with the selected presentation as if I had
|        subsequently typed an activation character.
| 
|    Anyway, there is not presently any way to do this in CLIM.  It would
|    probably take a bit of thought to come up with a translator to do this
|    because of the way command line processing works.
| 
| Is there only one command/translator combination that you want to
| behave in this way?  That is, are most of your other commands
| multi-argument commands or ones in which you want the user to hit
| Return as confirmation?  If so, there isn't any good way to do what
| you want.  However, if you want your application to be more
| mouse-based than keyboard-based you can get the behavior you want by
| running with the "menu" command interaction style.  The easies way to
| do this is to create a frame with no :interactor pane.

Yes I do want to build a more mouse-based interface.  I don't want to
type unless I have to!

The above suggestion is OK except it disallows any commands with
arguments.  There is no place to accept the arguments from!  The
interaction style assumes a textual command-line interface.

Maybe one needs to have another type of menu item to command
translator that does AVV popups for commands with arguments?  Then a
way to put this on the :select gesture for menu items.

I guess this is an example of another type of "interaction style."  In
my experience with DW and CLIM, folks always want to create their own
interaction styles - but this seems relatively hard to do.  Another
example is the dreaded no echo menu items.  Maybe there needs to be
more information about how commands and menu items work so that we can
build different interaction styles?  Can AVV panes help do the job?
How about different "translators?"  Maybe views?

CLIM seems to support the typed command-line interface quite well.
Included in this style are keyboard and menu accelerators for this
textual *typed* command-line interface.  Command arguments are
gathered thru the typed command line.

Another major style that one might concieve of would be to have popups
for gathering the arguments of a command rather than typing them at a
textual interface (:interactor panes).  Now keyboard and menu
accelerators would drive this popup style of gathering arguments for a
command.  No textual "command-line" would be necessary for this
interaction style (and thus no :interactor pane).

These styles might be extended to include different kinds of menu
accelerators.  For example:

  o pull-down, slide-off, tear-off menus all with graying for
    inactive menu items. 
  o pallettes (iconic menus???)

Gee, maybe someday we will have voice accelerators too!

All of these interaction styles eventually invoke "commands" to do
their work.  In that way, the implementation is independent of the
interaction style :-) I suppose that keyboard and menu accelerator
declarations don't even have to know the difference in interaction
styles.  The "declaration" of the interaction style realizes the
various declared accelerators in the correct way.  I presume that this
independence of the "presentation" of a command and its implementation
thru define-command was the basic design concept behind CLIM
commands!?

Any thoughts?

ba

Brian H. Anderson
Boeing Commercial Airplane
(206) 234-0881
bha@atc.boeing.com

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