Wimp_CreateMenu helper

Just to note down an idea before I forget it…

Iconbar menus are supposed to open at y=max(base_of_screen+96,mouse_pointer_y), but so many apps screw this up. ‘96’ is a bit of an arbitrary number and it might change if, say, the height of the iconbar were to be enlarged (see Retina Display thread). So have some kind of helper that does the necessary without the programmer having to know this calculation and other similar things, like producing a menu to the right of a ‘click here for menu’ icon. Programmers shouldn’t have to do calculations with arbitrary OS-defined constants. Maybe these could be flags to Wimp_CreateMenu?

‘96’ is a bit of an arbitrary number and it might change if, say, the height of the iconbar were to be enlarged (see Retina Display thread).

Or shrunk – on portables a smaller iconbar (or perhaps just smaller icons) could result in a useful amount of extra screen real estate.

At the very least, I think we need a call to allow the height (or position of top edge) of the iconbar to be read.

Iconbar menus are supposed to open at y=max(base_of_screen+96,mouse_pointer_y), but so many apps screw this up.

This actually came up at ROUGOL last night. Whilst we were playing around with the RPi disc image we noticed a couple of applications that were getting the menu height wrong..

Or shrunk – on portables a smaller iconbar (or perhaps just smaller icons)

One suggestion was having an option to use the ‘small’ icons on the Iconbar instead of the normal sized ones.

At the very least, I think we need a call to allow the height (or position of top edge) of the iconbar to be read.

Warning: Ugly hack follows…

REM >ibarheight
REM
REM "Ugly hack from hell"
REM
REM by Rick Murray
REM

y% = 0 : c% = 0
REPEAT : y% += 1 : c% =  POINT(0, y%) : UNTIL c% <> 0
SYS &35, -1, 5 TO ,,p%
p% = y% >> p%
m$ ="xxxxIconbar is "+STR$(y%)+" OS units high, "
m$+="which is "+STR$(p%)+" pixels in the current mode."
SYS &400DF,m$,((1<<9)+(1<<8)+(1<<4)),"Iconbar height",0,0,0

(^_^)

Perhaps the Wimp_ReadSysInfo (or whatever it is) should be expanded to provide a pointer to a data block that can be looked at, such as:

  blk%!0  = Iconbar height
  blk%!4  = Screen height (discounting iconbar)
  blk%!8  = Title bar height
  blk%!12 = Scroll bar width
  blk%!16 = Y offset to open iconbar menus
  blk%!20 = Wimp flags:
              bit 0 = Windows have iconise buttons
              bit 1 = Windows can go off-screen
              bit 2 = Windows toggled max don't cover iconbar

   etc, there's other stuff but I don't recall right now

Whilst we were playing around with the RPi disc image we noticed a couple of applications that were getting the menu height wrong..

In my defence, the application !SignalBox was set up so that the menu obtained here could include images – this required the inter-line spacing of the menu to be changed and all my subsequent apps (MultiTask, Cat) have had this left unchanged. Didn’t know about the 96 unit from bottom rule (was it there in RISC OS 2?).

Didn’t know about the 96 unit from bottom rule

Style Guide, page 92, “For icon bar menus, the base of the menu must be 96 OS units from the bottom of the screen.” so certainly decreed in 1993, I don’t have anything as early as RISC OS 2.

Yes, the iconbar menu should open just above a normally-placed icon. Preventing such menus opening below that should be easy enough, but there’s a million and one other things one might do at the same time:

• Automatic right-to-left on menus close to the right hand edge
• Prevent all menus from opening over the iconbar when that window bit is set
• Remove the line height from application control – it’s related to Wimp$FontSize really
• ALLOW KEYBOARD CONTROL OF MENUS!
• Entries containing a tab character split left/right on it, instead of hotkey grokking
• Wimp$MaxMenuHeight to automatically limit height of very long menus (scrollbar)

etc :-)

There’s no need for ugly hacks to read the iconbar height.

!blk% = -2
SYS "Wimp_GetWindowOutline",,blk%
iconbar_height% = blk%!16

SignalBox now updated to version 42.92 to (finally) correct the menu item height (after some [further] persuasion from Sprow) and the icon bar icon grey background vice transparent. Also now contains the full version (96Mbytes, compressed to 14Mbytes).

A kludged version (42.91) for ARMiniX to make the SOUND commands work correctly prior to the TEMPO fix on 28 June 2014 is still distributed in parallel but more recent versions of RISC OS on Pandaboard will work correctly with either the 42.9 version (2007) or the 42.92 version (2014).