I forgot to mention that the lists may contain 10,000s of items. Maybe 100,000s. Typing to select from NSPopUpButton works OK for short lists. I just made a test popup with 300 items and it's already awkward. 10K would be absurd.
These are business records, and users may data enter hundreds a day. They want to tab, type a few letters to select a customer, tab to the next field, type a bit to select an inventory item, etc. Type a customer that doesn't exist and it should beep and ignore the keystrokes. If they need to enter a new customer, it's a right-click, then a panel to enter more than just the name. Our current interface does use popup buttons for some things, but people complain about them. They don't want to take hands off keyboard. We plan to convert those to combo boxes so it can be completely mouseless. That "disambiguating field" article by Tog may be on one of the developer CDs. I can't find it online. It explained this use case very well, and interface to solve it. It was a major reason why we switched from Excel templates to a C++ app. NSComboBox is close, but we need it confined to existing items. Thanks, Casey McDermott Turtle Creek Software http://www.turtlesoft.com 607 220-4514 -------------------------------------------- On Wed, 7/25/18, Jens Alfke <j...@mooseyard.com> wrote: Subject: Re: NSComboBox To: "Casey McDermott" <supp...@turtlesoft.com> Cc: cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com Date: Wednesday, July 25, 2018, 2:51 PM On Jul 25, 2018, at 10:45 AM, Casey McDermott <supp...@turtlesoft.com> wrote: The goal is to auto-fill an account from what they type, and ignore typing if not a match. That sounds like the regular behavior of NSPopUpButton: after clicking to pop up the menu, you can type-select items from it. (Although it doesn't ignore mismatches, it just selects the closest item.) —Jens _______________________________________________ Cocoa-dev mailing list (Cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com) Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list. Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: https://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to arch...@mail-archive.com
