Documentation - The Style Guide

Good point – maybe ConfiX is one of the others you’re thinking of.

Yeah, that’s a great example. It’s tabs, too, but I don’t think it uses Rik’s implementation.

Another thing that bugs me is if you’ve got a writable field off a menu, and then you accidentally knock the mouse which closes it, and when you reopen it, it’s reset itself.

I haven’t read the style guide in many a year, but if it doesn’t say anything about this already, I’d like to suggest that good practice would be to save the contents of writable fields (and ideally the caret position therein) while the menu structure remains open.

This could be a bit clumsy with different length strings, formatting widths, spacing between radio buttons, etc. but someone could probably prove this not to be an issue. (Such issues irrelevant if icons used.)

I don’t think it’s an issue – or, at least, it’s the same issue whether horizontal or vertical. Just as the space between radio buttons has to be wide enough for any text if they’re placed horizontal, there has to be enough space to the side of them for the widest text when arranged vertically.

If anything, a vertical arrangement is probably a the more sensible approach for a ‘tab’ equivalent, since it allows more room for expansion (adding more tabs) – it’ll take more tabs/options to make the window too tall than it would to make it too wide. (The alternative is rows of options to replicate layered tabs. That would be horrid.)

Not too bothered where the tabs are, but please no scrolling regions within windows, they’re just horrible! That’s what resizeable windows are for.