I call new InfiniteProgress().showInfiniteBlocking() to prevent the user from entering any keys while my app is processing.
But there is only a circle animating when blocking the screen.
Can I have labels on the InfiniteBlocking screen to show some hints to the user?
The method is just a transparent dialog as you can see from the code. Just create your own version of that method with whatever customization you would like to have.
Related
I'm making an accessible web application. One of the feature is a button that allows users to scroll to a certain section of the page. I'm using window.scrollTo(x,y) for this functionality.
Now testing my application using the built-in Mac VoicerOver, I found that although I can click on the button and scroll with no problem, after scrolling, VoiceOver doesn't read anything. Instead I have to click on the mouse one, or use the keyboard equivalents to make it read the content that's on the screen after scrolling.
I'm afraid that some users may not realize that they need another click after clicking on the button. I have two possible solutions:
When the screen reader read the button, it also tells the user that if they want to go to the livechat, they need to click again after clicking on the button. I know how to implement this one, but it looks verbose and dumb.
Change my code so that VoiceOver will read the content after scrolling. I don't know how to implement this one.
The content I would like the screen reader to read is wrapped in a tag.
If you are only scrolling the page, then most screen reader users will not care that you scrolled. With limited or no vision, whether the screen scrolls or not does not matter because the screen cannot be seen.
However, if you are scrolling the page in order to put a certain element into view, then that would benefit screen reader users too.
It sounds like you're trying to do the latter:
allow users to scroll to a certain section of the page
In that case, you also need to put the keyboard focus on that element via the focus() javascript call. Moving the focus will cause VoiceOver to read that content. But to move the focus to a natively non-focusable element (such as an <h2> or a <section> or <p>), the receiving element will need tabindex="-1".
<h2 tabindex="-1" id="myh2">some heading</h2>
and then somewhere you'd have this javascript:
var element = document.getElementById("myh2");
element.focus();
I am creating a form in MS Access. My form appears to the user in form of a modal pop-up box. At the bottom of the form we get Navigation Buttons, New Entry (which I have disabled), Filter and Search Options.
I want to customize this Navigation Button Bar. For example, I do not want 'Record' word to appear at the left most position in this bar.
I have been searching ways to do the same. I am not sure if the same can be achieved, but still hopeful.
Thanks in anticipation.
Jay
You can disable Navigation Buttons in form properties, which means the bar does not appear and in Access 2007 and 2010, you can set the Navigation Caption, which means you can have something instead of "Record", but you cannot customize the bar itself.
If you must have custom navigation, disable the bar and add your own navigation options.
You can change the Record into something else, but not customize the other bits of the navigation bar as far as I know.
Will show as:
If you want to go further than that, you may be able to intercept windows messages and change the wording on the fly, but that would complex and certainly a lot of work for not much.
On the other hand you could simply not show the navigation bar and create your own navigation using buttons and a bit of VBA instead.
Like the title said,how may i turn the grid(or page) and the components in it into background gray and unable and show a new component in foreground.
It's a common effect in the web page,but i cannot do that with a xaml.
Please answer in detail better with sample code if you do.Thanks in advance.
Here's an example of using a Popup to display a UserControl when a Page is navigated to. The OnNavigatedTo function creates a popup, binds a Click event to the UserControl, and then shows the UserControl over the entire page. If the correct password is entered, ("password" in the example) the control disappears. You'll need to modify it for your own requirements, but it should definitely get you started.
https://skydrive.live.com/redir.aspx?cid=ef08824b672fb5d8&resid=EF08824B672FB5D8!343
You'll want to use the VisualStateManager and create some animation transitions to switch between the old and new components. I won't paste the code here for brevity, but if you check out:
http://visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/2011/07/22/wcmob_visual-states.aspx
You'll see a simple example of switching between two UI components on a single page within a Windows Phone 7 PhoneApplicationPage. In your scenario, you'd use this paradigm to create 2 animation storyboards, one for showing an overlay control and one for settings the 'disabled' property on the main grid.
I'm trying to show a context menu when I left-click a NotifyIcon. Just calling NotifyIcon.ContextMenuStrip.Show() doesn't work very well. A solution has been posted here before that calls a secret method using Reflection:
Dim mi As System.Reflection.MethodInfo = GetType(NotifyIcon).GetMethod("ShowContextMenu", Reflection.BindingFlags.Instance Or Reflection.BindingFlags.NonPublic)
mi.Invoke(Icon, Nothing)
This works great, except that I also need to control where the menu is shown. I want to wait for the SystemInformation.DoubleClickTime to elapse between receiving the NotifyIcon.MouseUp event and displaying the menu, so that I can handle single-clicks and double-clicks separately. But invoking the ShowContextMenu method displays the menu at the current mouse position when ShowContextMenu is called, not when the icon was actually clicked. Which means that if the mouse moved during the DoubleClickTime, the menu will be displayed in a different part of the screen. So if I can control where the menu is shown, I can just save the mouse coordinates when I receive the MouseUp event, and then I can ensure that the menu is displayed near the icon. Is there a way to do this?
Thanks in advance.
Well, I just discovered that there are existing programs that exhibit this same behavior. I just went through all the icons in my system tray and about half of them do it. If you left-click the icon and then move the mouse during the delay before the menu appears, the menu will appear at the last mouse location, wherever that is on the screen. Snagit is one application that does this. Outlook is the only program in my tray that always shows the menu where I clicked the icon. But Snagit looks like it's using a .NET ContextMenuStrip, while Outlook is probably using a native menu.
So either this is standard behavior, or it's a problem that no one else has been able to solve either. And as a user, I've never noticed this behavior until yesterday when I was testing my own application. So I guess it's not that big of a deal and I won't worry about it.
Is there a way to start off showing a dialog modally, but then instead of hiding it, to keep it visible while changing it to a non-modal dialog?
I want to show a dialog, blocking the method that shows the dialog. Then when the user clicks the 'Finish' button on the dialog I want:
The dialog to remain visible.
Control to return to the method that showed the dialog.
I've achieved this result by running the dialog on a separate STA thread, and using an event to block the main UI thread until 'Finish' is pressed, but there's a catch to this method: you can click on the close button of the 'main' window while the dialog is visible, and the main window closes when the dialog is hidden.
Update
Thanks for the responses so far. Sorry - it looks like I got the balance wrong between too much background and not enough.
The form is effectively a modal 'wizard' dialog - it appears, sits in front of the main app modally, and then is hidden. So as far as the user's concerned there's no non-standard weirdness going on. The only difference is that the dialog is driven from a series of callbacks from the UI thread, so I don't think making it truly modal (via a call to ShowDialog) for its lifetime would work. The first callback must show the dialog, and then block while the user sets their preferences via the dialog UI. After that, the dialog stays visible and displays a progress bar page while various other callbacks are made from the UI thread. Eventually the form is hidden. The user isn't interacting with the main window while the form is up. As far as they're concerned, it should appear to be 100% modal wrt the main UI thread.
(The form is a dialog for a Visual Studio wizard - these are driven from a series of callbacks on the UI thread). An alternative would be to show the dialog, hide it, immediately show a topmost 'progress' form instead and then hide that, but I think showing a single dialog is more seamless an experience for the user.
Again - sorry for the confusion!
Perhaps you want to rethink your interaction model? How are you going to explain this to your users? They have an internalized model of how computer programs work, and you better have a very good reason to break that. They know about modal dialogs, they know about non-modal dialogs, they know about inspectors. Choose one, and apply it.
Modal dialogs are made for short-time interaction. They should not block exiting the application. The user is in control of the interaction, the program only provides the minimum of restrictions needed.
[after the explanation, replaced]
What's wrong with showing the progress bar in the modal dialog? Start processing once ok
is clicked, disabling all buttons, only keeping the cancel button active? If it takes a long time, the user might want to abort the action. Only close the dialog when you're finished processing.
You could use a modeless dialog then have your main UI check if the user has clicked the Finished button. If the modeless dialog is open but Finished hasn't been clicked then don't respond to any users actions in the main form...
This is just a terrible idea - it's completely non-standard behavior and you're going to jump through all kinds of hoops to get something working that is just going to horribly confuse your users.
Like most of the other answers here stated, you're implement non-standard UI elements that will be confusing to most users.
If the dialog remains visible just to provide read-only access to the data, then why not have dialog window close normally and open a side-bar window in your application with the data from the dialog window?
If the dialog remains visible to allow the users to continue making updates in it, then perhaps, it shouldn't be modal to begin with.
Point is, there's a couple different ways you can accomplish your task without breaking standard UI metaphors.
I'd make it a flyout from the side or bottom of your app that shoves other things out of the way. If it's on top of other stuff that the user might need to see or interact with then it's just gonna annoy them.
I found that showing an an invisible modal dialog on the main UI thread during the blocking stage of the interaction works great.
Hidden modal dialog settings (so it's not visible): ShowInTaskBar=false, FormBorderStyle=None, size={0,0}, Opacity=0%, StartupPosition=CenterParent.
The hidden dialog is shown on the UI thread using ShowDialog. The visible dialog is shown on a separate STA thread. The thread is kicked off before calling hiddenDialog.ShowDialog on the main UI thread.
The visible dialog hides hiddenDialog when it wants the initial blocking state to complete. This stops the main UI thread from blocking.
The important bits of code:
void LaunchWizardForm(s)
{
// Show the wizard on its own thread.
ThreadStart t = () =>
{
_wizard = new WizardForm(s);
Application.Run(new ApplicationContext(_wizard));
};
var thread = new Thread(t);
thread.SetApartmentState(ApartmentState.STA);
thread.Start();
// Block this (main UI) thread
_hiddenForm.ShowDialog();
}
void EndModalEpisode()
{
_hiddenForm.Invoke((Action) (() => _hiddenForm.Hide()));
}