Pop-up Menu Tricks

Pop-up menus are the de facto widget for making selections from multi-option fields on mobile devices. Sure, checkboxes are possible, but they take up as much space as you have items. Not very efficient given the limited space on smartphones and tablets.

So, on mobile, the two most viable solutions for making multiple selections for a single field are either portals or a pop-up menu. You can use an additional window as well, but that's a technique for another day.

FileMaker has long supported making multiple selections in a pop-up menu via the Shift modifier key. In FileMaker 11, however, this feature went way on Mac OS X. The feature went away but the functionality did not. In fact, we still need this functionality for keeping things nice and compact in mobile only or hybrid designs.

This video showcases a wonderful technique, which works on both desktop and mobile, for supporting a default multi-selection option on fields formatted as pop-up menus.

If you're tight on space and need to offer more than one selection within the same field then look no further than this powerful technique!