[Cuis-dev] Don't Mode Me In: >>layerNumber

[ken.dickey at whidbey.com]

Hi Folks,

I have been playing around with the #layerNumber which solves the desire 
to have some windows come before others (a.k.a. "stay on top").

I have not yet come to a crisp set of rubrics/behaviors, but thought to 
share some of my concerns -- why the current behavior bugs me.

Larry Tesler had a motto "Don't Mode Me In" as a reaction to text 
editors with modes which required a user take some action with no 
possibility of an override -- one got into a "Mode" which had to be delt 
with.

I guess I feel the same way about the current #layerNumber behavior.

I attached a couple of screenshots.

The first one shows a Morph with selection handles, one of which was 
used to open its menu, and a menu selection of #borderWidth: brought up 
an edit panel with which to fill in a new value.  Note that the halo 
morphs are above the menu and both are above the fill-in panel.

The second example shows a morph's menu used to bring up a color 
selection panel which now totally hides the original morph.  One is 
unable to "send to back" or "bring to front" the original morph or these 
panels.  The menu stays in front of the panel hides the original morph.

Perhaps worse, Selecting a panel's menu->debug->"browse morph class" 
brings up a browser _behind_ the larger color picker panel, which makes 
browser use much more painful.

One thought was to have a Z-order "slice" which maintains a 
front-to-back relation between a morph, its handles, its menu, and 
related fill-ins/pop-ups.  The idea here would be that the entire 
related "slice" could be brought to the front or sent to the back of all 
other Morphs.  One could re-arrange ordering within the "slice" so that 
a menu could show up in front of construction handles and fill-in panels 
could be in front of or behind the menu.

Also, some popUps are not closely related to any base morph and their 
behavior should be independent as well.

So I don't have a real solution here (yet!).  But I think we can do 
better than this and  you smart folks should be able to help out!

In any case, I really do want "send to back" and "bring to front" to 
again do what I expect.

Thanks for listening,
-KenD
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