Re: RGSG - contents of Program menu

[John R Sheets <dusk smsi-roman com>]

Dan Effugas Kaminsky wrote:
> 
> As I've been saying, I'm *OK* with Preferences going with the
> menuprint/Program menu.  But preferences are by their nature rarely
> accessed, meaning we take the most prime real estate on the entire menu bar
> and fill it with...toys?!

Okay, I think you're going on a different set of assumptions than
Tom is.  You are identifying "Preferences" with settings that are
rarely accessed.  As near as I can tell, Tom (or at least I do)
sees "Preferences", or whatever settings menu item ends up in the
foot menu, to be application-wide settings, regardless of how
common/rare they are.

Would you disagree that settings that affect the application as a
whole (e.g. "Show Toolbar Text") should be placed in the foot
menu?

Also, regardless of what IBM's research was about the leftmost
menus being the most commonly accessed, we appear to be moving
away from that, into a more object-oriented menu standard, based
more on scope than on frequency of use.  Application-scope menu
items go in the first menu.  File/document/object-manipulating
menu items go in the second menu.  The following menus should
either describe further objects (e.g. a layout program that
handles text document-editing differently than image-editing,
leading to both "Document" and "Image" menus), or other large
categories of functionality (e.g. "Format", "View", even "Print"
if the print functionality is very advanced & complex).  IBM's
research is important, but I don't think we should base our menu
structure solely on frequency of use.

Please try to get your assumptions down straight before spending
so much time arguing a point.  That in itself will be more useful
toward reducing the incredible amount of noise this list has been
producing lately.

John