Chapter 6 Application level pull down menus

The second interface which will be presented is a standard application level menu style. This style consists of a sequence of menu buttons mounted on a menu bar at the top of the application. Each menu button, when activated, causes a pull-down menu of items to be presented. An item may be an action button which causes an action to occur, a menu button which causes a cascading menu to appear or a dialog button which causes a dialog panel to appear.

This style of interface has become ubiquitous for a very large number of applications and hence has a major advantage that, because of this widespread use, users will feel very familiar with it. However it is probably the least suitable style of interface for the control of a tuttle, it is being introduced so that the techniques for the construction of this style of interface can be used where an application level menu style of interface is more suitable.

This chapter will also introduce the techniques and mechanisms which can be used to deploy a dialog panel within an application. This is a temporary window which appears on top of the main application window and informs the user of some occurrence or error or obtains some information from the user. Although dialog panels are being introduced in the context of application level menus they can also be used with other styles of user interface.


6.1 The MenuBarTuttle interface

Table of Contents.




A Java GUI programmer's primer
Java GUI Programmers Primer, A
ISBN: 0139088490
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 1998
Pages: 85
Authors: Fintan Culwin

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