I just made my first contribution to ‘Report-an-Apple-Bug Friday‘. The bug is the inconsistent behaviour of the right hand menus (like the time, switch user, battery and volume menus). When selecting one of them and dragging to another, sometimes the other one opens (as expected), and sometimes doesn’t. I haven’t been able to decern a reliable pattern, but playing with them for a minute or so reproduces the problem quite easily (at least for me).
For some reason, my ADC account (admittedly I haven’t used it in quite a while) wouldn’t let me log into the bug reporter so I used the public one but that one hasn’t sent me a bug id yet, but I’ll add it here when it does.
And while we’re on bugs, what’s up with this bit of the form? Maybe that’s one for next week.
September 3rd, 2005 at 12:16 am
I can’t reproduce your bug. What are the exact menus you use? I don’t see anything you describe using the ones you listed. Only the airport has delayed appearance, but that is expected as it searches for the available networks every time.
September 3rd, 2005 at 11:06 am
Hmmmm, well, I can reproduce it right now dragging from the clock menu (under the time) over the user menu. I’ll post a screen shot in a minute.
September 3rd, 2005 at 11:20 am
Indeed, this is a long-standing bug. There actually is rhyme or reason to it — it has to do with whether the thing in the right-hand side of your menu bar is a menu-extra or if it is simply an NSStatusItem.
Anything that is a menu extra means that is command-draggable in the menu bar to rearrange it. Anything else is an NSStatusItem (for all practical purposes — I’m not sure if the Spotlight menu item is an NSStatusItem or not).
So, if you click on a menu extra, and then drag over to an NSStatusItem (or the Spotlight menu or any other regular menu), those menus will not open. You can drag back to other menu extras to get them to open, but anything that isn’t a menu extra will not have its menu open in the same drag.
However, if you click on something that ISN’T a menu extra — for example, the Spotlight menu item or a regular menu item on the left side — you can open ANY OTHER menu in the same drag. That means you can bring down the Spotlight menu, drag over to a menu extra, and that menu extra’s menu will open.
However, here’s the catch: if you start a drag on a non-menu extra, and then drag over to a menu extra, you cannot drag back to a non-menu extra to get its menu to open. Example: click on the Spotlight menu item to get its menu to open. Drag over to a menu extra, and observe that its menu opens. Now drag back to the Spotlight menu item, and observe that the menu doesn’t open anymore. (If you don’t have Tiger, repeat this procedure, but just start with one of the menus on the left-side of your menu bar.)
Hope all that made sense. It’s an obscure bug, but it is kind of annoying.
– Simone
September 3rd, 2005 at 11:36 am
[...] Thanks to Simone Manganelli for a useful rundown of what sounds like the same bug. It doesn’t quite explain the inconsistency (i.e. I can sometimes drag from the time menu to the user one as in that screen-shot without a problem), but it sounds like those menus are generally problematic. [...]