Windows Themes & UI hints

[jduff]

Hi,
In addition to the problem "Missing focus rectangle using Windows Themes & VA8.0" by joselle on May 20, 2009, I am seeing another difference in how VA 8.0 and/or Windows Themes support is negatively affecting our application....

All of our buttons and menu items have the mnemonic set on them. Until we upgraded to supporting Windows Themes, a user could have Windows set to hide those underlines until they hit the Alt key; but as soon as they hit the Alt key then the underline would show up. That applies to both menu item and button underlines.

However, with Windows Themes support enabled, the underlines on buttons do not show up anymore when holding down Alt. Only by:

• In Windows, turning on showing underlines all of the time
• Holding down Alt BEFORE opening the window; in which case the underlines appear until window closed, not just momentary like it used to be.

I would appreciate any comments on the underlines and the focus rectangles. Thanks!
John

[marten]

But with VASmalltalk itselfs this seems to work !? Actually I have updated to B140 - but when holding the ALT key the underlines appears in the transcript window. (here under W7/64)

[jduff]

Sorry, if I didn't make that part clear: menus are working fine. Yes, if I hold down ALT key then the menu underlines appear. I am focusing on buttons and there are very few buttons left in the VASmalltalk UI since they were replaced with graphic icons. But I think I found a valid example:


Steps to reproduce.

0. Prep. If in XP, go to Display Properties then Appearance tab, then the Effects... button. Uncheck the last item "Hide underlined letters for keyboard nav...". If in Vista (or Win 7?) go to the Ease of Access control panel (Windows key+U) then Keyboard setting and find the equivalent setting. With that setup in place do these steps:

1. Go to Transcript.
2. Using the mouse, click on Tools --> Browse Class... Notice that the OK button does NOT show an underline on the "O" (ALT-O works, you just have no visual indication that ALT-O is what you can press.)
3. Press and hold down the ALT key. I would expect that the underline on the button would appear.

This time, use the keyboard to navigate.
4. Go to the Transcript.
5. Type ALT-T
6. hit C.
7. result: the Browse Class dialog opens. This time the underlines appear but ONLY because you used keyboard navigation to open the window.



The first set of steps (1-3) is counter to the way our underlines used to work, steps 4-7 just show that underlines work, but only when you navigate to the window using the ALT keys; which is not an acceptable solution.

I found an example in Internet Explorer that demonstrates how I would expect it to work:
1. Launch Internet Explorer. In my case IE 7, but hopefully same in other versions.
2. Go to Tools (gear icon or use menus).
3. Select the option "Delete Browsing History..."
4. Notice that none of the (7) buttons on that UI have underlines.
5. Hit ALT.
6. Notice that the underlines appear.