Re: slab menu

[JP Rosevear <jpr novell com>]

On Mon, 2007-02-05 at 18:13 +0000, Calum Benson wrote:
> On Mon, 2007-02-05 at 13:02 -0500, JP Rosevear wrote:
> 
> > How is it slow to get to things vs a traditional hierarchal menu? My
> > important apps are two clicks away -> open menu -> click.  Hierarachal
> > menus more clicks than that.  Don't like the default list?  Drag from
> > the app browser and drop them on the menu.
> 
> Much as we'd all like it to be untrue, that's still more customisation
> than many (most?) "average" users are either willing to do, or have the
> knowledge to do, or (in some cases) are allowed to do by their sysadmin.

So the alternative is to going digging through a set of 3 deeps menus
with arbitrary and overlapping categorization?  This also doesn't
provide a counter to the original speed argument (I don't see you
claiming hierarchical menus are any faster).  As well as this recent
applications are shown to cut down on time to reach (its implemented
even nicer in Jim's new stuff).

> You should see the state of the Start menu on my wife's Windows laptop,
> it takes up almost the whole screen, and it's not even in alphabetical
> order :)  But she says she has no interest in streamlining it, and
> wouldn't know how to anyway.

I'm not really getting the counter argument here - rhat she has no
interest in streamlining it implies it works for her.  I think
alphabetical is a bad idea any how because it destroys the spacial
aspect of memory.  By default it gets appended, but you can re-order
them.

Everyone seems to have the impression this was just thrown together with
no user testing, which is definitely not true.  See test data on
betterdesktop.org

http://www.betterdesktop.org/wiki/index.php?title=Data
Task: Find the file MITBlueprints.PDF
Task: Find the folder "Building Sites"
Task: Determine what was the last image you edited
Task: Find out if your computer is online
Task: Find a copy of "The Frog Prince"
... more

The analysis reports are being polished and finalized for release.

If Sun has some metrics or test data on hierarchical menus, it would be
great to look through. 

-JP