best practice for adding clickability to non-clickable objects?

discopatrick's icon

Sometimes I want to be able to click an object that is not usually clickable - e.g. a panel.

One way I've thought about doing this is placing a clickable object like a button on top of the panel, but making the button transparent. Then when I click the panel, the invisible button will send a bang.

Does anyone have any better ideas?

Ploki's icon

there's an object made especially for that, its called "ubutton"
it has a few more parameters to choose from (position of click, mouse up, mouse down, etc)

discopatrick's icon

nice, thanks Ploki :)

seejayjames's icon

In max 5 an up there's also [hover], so you could scripting-name various objects (though not all will work with [hover] as I recall) and sense when the mouse is over them. Then you can use [mousestate] to sense the click. Might be helpful too, and you have the advantage of getting a message before the click, if you want that.

Roman Thilenius's icon

[ubutton] works fine in the foreground, [lcd] can do the same and more and works when behind the visible object.

-110

Stephane Morisse's icon

what do you mean by 'non-clickable' ? could you post an example ?

Floating Point's icon

what do you mean by 'non-clickable' ?

it's an object that does not produce any output or change its state in any way when the patcher is locked; ie cellblock, button etc are 'clickable', because they respond to a mouse click in some way.

discopatrick's icon

Yes Terry, that's exactly what I meant by 'non-clickable'.

Thanks for the other suggestions too.