Re: what's going on with menus?

[Calum Benson <Calum Benson Sun COM>]

On Sun, 2004-05-23 at 14:49, Christian Neumair wrote:

> > Well, what do you think about
> > http://www.cluecoder.org/manny/calum-menu-edit.png ?

Yeah, that looks like the sort of thing I had in mind. It might be fun
to experiment with making the Applications list look more like the list
in the Theme and Background capplets, too (application names in
bold/large, tooltip underneath in regular font, app icon to the left). 
But when I was sketching it out I got the impression that this format
probably wouldn't work terribly well as a checkbox list, which is a
pity.

> I've revamped it a bit:
> http://www.cluecoder.org/manny/calum-menu-edit2.png
> Hopefully the complexity isn't unbearable. This should even fit power
> users' needs.

Hmm, does the shown/hidden filter really help you any more than sorting
the list on the "Show" column?  And likewise, if we decided the
before/after filter was important, wouldn't adding a sortable 'Date
Added' column to the Applications list solve the same problem?  I think
I'd need to be convinced about this feature though... what's the use
case, and how common is it?  I know I've never thought about dates any
time I've been editing my Windows Start menu-- nor do I have the
faintest idea of when I added anything to it anyway :)

Well done for spotting that I forgot about editing the top-level entries
in my original sketch though :)  I'm not sure having an entry for it
feels quite right in a flat list, though... we probably want to avoid
'special' entries if we can (which as Mark pointed out, should probably
go for the "All" item too-- making the menu list multi-selectable might
well be good enough to keep power users happy).  Perhaps it might make
more sense just to have a tree view with "Main Menu" at the root,
although admittedly that would also start making things a bit wide...

+-Main Menu
| |-Accessibility
| |-Accessories
| +-Desktop Preferences
| | |-Accessibility
| | |-Advanced
| |-Games 
. .    .
. .    .

Cheeri,
Calum.

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

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems