Thanks Zax,
I gave it a try. It produced an error on first run
but then ran fine. It's kinda cool and does what it says on the tin.
Overall this works well.
Some comments, perhaps for a version 2:
1. Usage The button to lock it in an open position is right at the edge of the stack's titlebar, and it's easy to overshoot it resulting in the window closing abruptly and having to repeat. You have to know to lock it, then drag the apps precisely over the placeholders for the icons, but when dragging apps onto it, they don't hilite when dragging Finder items in. It's not immediately obvious to someone picking it up that you need to!
Maybe consider moving the 'lock' button to a 'safer' place and make it more obvious this is how you add icons? Not sure if there is a way to make the receptacles visible on drag - certainly they do when moving icons from one slot to another but not when you drag stuff from the finder unless you're right on top of the slot. Since the drag starts from outside the app, maybe acting on the resumeStack as the stack becomes active with the drag could do that?
2. Accessibility The other thing to consider is that this only works if the app is in the foreground - you have to switch to the app then open it then click. And having switched to the app I would probably prefer if the window showed on mouseEnter rather than mouseUp.
Some Mac users may take the 'low-tech' solution of just adding folders of shortcuts to their Dock (add aliases to these, then set it to 'Fan' or 'Grid' and it pops up your apps/documents), making these accessible from anywhere.
I've never used it, but perhaps having an option to
set the systemWindow of the stack to true so it always shows may be a nice option for some? This will make always float above any app or window.
Ideally this would be a menubar item but really not sure if/how you can do this with LiveCode. There is a 'Mac Status Menu' library that I guess lets you do this, but the documentation puts Spartans to shame - to say it's laconic is a
vast overstatement.
3. Image Quality The icons of the stuff dragged on appears to be quite low-resolution. I don't know if setting the
resizeQuality to "best" will help with that? Or maybe not...
5. Preferences Consider adding a 'preference' that would allow naming/renaming of the row sections etc. On this note, the preferences appear in a non-mac-like position (first menu item in the file menu). I think
if you leave it in the default position in the end of the Edit menu, livecode will put this in the application menu for you, and you can give it the usual MacOS shortcut of cmd-,
The preferences appear right over your 'toggle' at the right edge of the screen, but as a user I expect these to appears centre-screen. I presume this is a substack of the main stack. Consider centering it on the screen, easier on the eyes.
Also -
unlock is not directly intuitive - perhaps consider renaming it to a more explicit name like 'move anchor' or whatever you call your little iconified widget
. Movement of said anchor is very choppy - looks like there is a lot of processing going on during mouseMove/drag, can this be deferred to mouseUp? I think perhaps this is best done with a right-click-drag or ctrl/cmd-drag rather than having to go to the file menu and manually select the item first.
Overall, your app is solid and does what it says it will.
I hope you find these comments useful but won't be offended if you ignore them all
Stam
