Hi Tim,
Possibly related functionally but certainly by subject area - the modal dialogues I build for the file chooser etc are 'violated' by a yellowbuttonmenu IF you haven't turned off yellowbutton menus. Not noticed before because my normal preferences do just that; this time I tried some stuff in a very vanilla image and spotted the problem.
Open a file chooser. cClick about a bit to make sure it is live. Click yellow button; you can now wander off and click in other windows - you've killed the modal nature of the dialog. You can 'return' by simply clicking in the dialog again.
I'm glad you put 'violated' in quotes like that, since there can be other scopes of modality than global. For example, it could extend from only the window which spawned it (the ideal), OR (going in the other direction to the extreme), what if opening up a FileDialog in your Squeak image not only prevented you from interacting with other Squeak windows but all other OS windows, too? (Impossible, I know, but a question for conceptual illustration..). IMO, any scope beyond the minimum scope seems arbitarily restricting.
I think we should consider making all modal dialogs scoped only to the spawner. As long as the dialog selection works and continues to process upon the selection, this sounds like a feature. Because even after the user has opened the dialog and navigated to the directory they want, if they find different file-names than they expected and need to go look elsewhere in the image to confirm, -- it seems unnecessary to make them cancel out and go through all of that again.
Best, Chris
(I just noticed that using the halo does the same.) Turn off 'generalizedYellowButtonMenu' in the preferences and you don't get the (non-halo) problem.
tim
tim Rowledge; tim@rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim Spell checkers at maximum! Fire!