Pop-up menus have been around on the Macintosh since HFS (Hierarchical File System) was introduced in 1986, and their use became much more widespread after the addition of Toolbox support in 1987. It is surprising, then, that many Macintosh users have no idea what pop-up menus are and do not recognize them when they see them. The problem is that pop-up menus do not look sufficiently different from other Macintosh interface elements; the one-pixel drop shadow that differentiates pop-up menus from editable text fields has proven inadequate. This Note presents the new standard appearance for the pop-up menu in System Software 7.0 and also describes how the new appearance lends itself to some new uses that were previously impossible.
Standard pop-up menus
Previously, pop-up menus were displayed by surrounding the current value of the menu with a one-pixel rectangle and a one-pixel drop shadow to the right and bottom. The new standard appearance adds a downward-pointing black arrow, which is identical to the arrow that indicates that a menu is too long to fit on the screen and must scroll. All pop-up menus should now use this new style. Figure 1 shows a simple pop-up menu in both the old and new styles.
Figure 1╨Old-style and new-style pop-up menus
Figure 2 shows an expanded view of the downward-pointing black arrow of this new-style pop-up menu.
Figure 2╨FatBits view of new-style pop-up menu
When the user clicks on the pop-up menu or its label text, the black arrow disappears and the menu pops up, and when the user releases the mouse button, the menu disappears and the black arrow is redrawn. Figure 3 illustrates the proper behavior of a pop-up menu when a user clicks on it.
Figure 3╨Pop-up menu before and during a mouse click
Pop-up menus with editable text fields
Sometimes it is useful to display a list of choices but still allow a user to enter or edit a choice that the application may not know in advance. One example is a font size field with an accompanying pop-up menu of commonly used sizes. The new standard pop-up menu appearance leads itself readily to this use, as shown in Figure 4.
Figure 4╨Pop-up menu with an editable text field
Note that as in standard pop-up menus, the black arrow disappears when a user clicks on it and reappears when a user releases the mouse button. In addition, the entire contents of the text edit field is selected when the pop-up menu is displayed, which reinforces the idea that the menu selection changes the value in the text field. It is not necessary to invert the label of a pop-up menu with an editable text field. Finally, note that an application should always draw the pop-up menu so it automatically highlights the item that corresponds to the value in the edit text field; this technique prevents a quick click in the pop-up menu from accidently erasing the previous value.
If a user enters a value in the edit text field that does not match any of the pop-up menu╒s items, then the pop-up menu should make that value the first item and separate it from the rest of the standard values with a gray line., as shown in Figure 5. This separation makes a clean distinction between common items, which are always available, and the user-entered value, which is only temporary. (In the case of the example in Figure 5, if the font size 13 had been inserted in order into the list, a subsequent selection of 10, or any other matching selection, would have removed it from the list.)
Figure 5╨Pop-up menu with a non-matching edit text item
