Breaking down Amazon's mega dropdown

Re:Breaking down Amazon's mega dropdown by LukeShu on Wednesday March 06, 2013 @09:16AM (#5331211)

For comparison to native applications:

    - Firefox 19 uses the delay technique
    - GTK3 uses the triangle technique
    - Tk 8.6 does what bootstrap does
    - I can't figure out what Qt 4 does

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Re:Breaking down Amazon's mega dropdown by masklinn on Wednesday March 06, 2013 @09:24AM (#5331259)

Cocoa seems to be using the triangle technique + a delay, FWIW: a submenu will close instantly when navigating vertically or to the opposite direction, but there is a lot of leeway when navigating in the triangle towards the submenu (eyeballing it, seems to take more than half a second for the submenu to close). And interestingly, you can also "overshoot" the submenu, it will delay its closing quite a bit when moving around/outside of it.

> - Tk 8.6 does what bootstrap does

Which is?

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Re:Breaking down Amazon's mega dropdown by npongratz on Wednesday March 06, 2013 @10:15AM (#5331519)

>> - Tk 8.6 does what bootstrap does

>Which is?

Per TFA: "... when you try to move your mouse from the main menu to the submenu, the submenu will disappear out from under you like some sort of sick, unwinnable game of whack-a-mole."

http://static.tumblr.com/9hgswys/iU1mj8c6y/bootstrap-bug.gif

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Re:Breaking down Amazon's mega dropdown by masklinn on Wednesday March 06, 2013 @10:27AM (#5331581)

Ah I'd missed that part, thanks.

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Re:Breaking down Amazon's mega dropdown by pserwylo on Wednesday March 06, 2013 @07:34PM (#5335100)

Thanks for the list. We were quite literally discussing this at work only yesterday, because the IntelliJ interface doesn't do anything. They use the Java Swing toolkit, which doesn't have any special treatement of sub-menu's.

I was still dissapointed, not because Swing doesn't support it (I can't stand the default Swing Look and Feel), but because everything about their custom Look and Feel is awesome compared to default Swing, so I was hoping that they had added this feature too.

I'm hoping that the open source community edition includes the source for their Look and Feel, but I'll have to wait until I've finished checking out the 1GB of source from github and then start trawling through it.

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Re:Breaking down Amazon's mega dropdown by ssp on Wednesday March 06, 2013 @12:20PM (#5332291)

- GTK3 uses the triangle technique

GTK+ uses the triangle technique along with a delay of 225 ms. When the pointer is inside the triangle, the delay is 1500 ms.

Firefox subscribes to the misguided "fake the look and feel of the default toolkit" idea, so on Linux it has a 225 ms delay, but without the triangle. Unfortunately 225 ms is way too short when there is no triangle.

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Re:Breaking down Amazon's mega dropdown by mpyne on Wednesday March 06, 2013 @10:27AM (#5331579)

Unfortunately I don't think Qt 4 does anything. Submenus are one of the annoying misfeature of the toolkit.

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Re:Breaking down Amazon's mega dropdown by LukeShu on Thursday March 07, 2013 @01:38PM (#5339289)

I noticed that Qt programs were less likely to use sub-menus, probably for this reason.

It's doing something; doing "nothing" is what Bootstrap does. But Qt 4 actually seems to go out of it's way to be unpredictable.

     _____
    |item1|_______
    |item2|item2.1|
    |item3|item2.2|
    |item4|

If I drag my cursor from item2 to item2.2 through item3 qucikly, there's clearly a delay, as I see item2.2 get highlighted, but then the submenu disappears, and it selects item3. However, if I overshoot and drag the cursor out of the menu altogether, it leaves item2.2 selected.

But then I think it does something with the angle it is moving at to make that sometimes not work.

The behaviour is complex and unpredictable, which is different than nothing.

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