Re: menu editing griefs: How collaboration did not work. But it should work!

[Calum Benson <Calum Benson Sun COM>]

On 22 Sep 2006, at 21:37, Christian Neumair wrote:

> Suddently, shortly before the end of a development cycle, Mark came up
> with another menu editor [2], called gmenu-simple-editor, which was  
> also
> based on Calum's proposal, but as far as I know Mark didn't really
> arrange detailed usability aspects with Calum. I wasn't sure why he  
> came
> up with it, and supposed that he might have some different innovative
> ideas in mind, or maybe just preferred Python, but then again we could
> have used Alacarte as a base.  Because Mark told me (in private)  
> that my
> GUI wasn't simple enough, I shifted the advanced stuff into context
> menus. At some point the GUI exactly matched gmenu-simple-editor  
> except
> for more features, which were only accessible through the context  
> menu,
> shortcuts and DND, but now the UI didn't entirely match Calum's  
> proposal
> anymore.

I should probably just clarify that I didn't consider said proposal  
to be the Best Ever Simple Menu Editor Design or anything like  
that :)  It was just one possibility based on the requirements that  
were being discussed at the time, and I didn't have any problem with  
it evolving over time to emphasise those requirements differently, or  
to meet new requirements as they arose.  (Indeed, that's pretty much  
how design should happen, provided those iterations are as well- 
thought-out as the original.)

I'd agree that it's a bit unfortunate that it's apparently taken  
three different implementations to get us to where we are now,  
though, given that alacarte isn't actually very different from that  
original proposal.

Cheeri,
Calum.

--
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson sun com            Java Desktop System Team
http://blogs.sun.com/calum             +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems