Re: Menu Premise (was Re: tmfkap, File, &c)

[Michael Poole <poole graviton res cmu edu>]

"Dan \"Effugas\" Kaminsky" <effugas@best.com> writes:

> Quick comment...
> 
> Dude, coders aren't going to make two menus.  Can you imagine documenting
> such a thing?!?

    I'm a coder.  I'd make two sets of menus if I thought it would make the
app significantly easier or more logical to use, or even if I got bored one
day while coding the hard parts of the app.
    Documenting it wouldn't be fun, but it wouldn't be worse than any other
documentation, and with proper hyper-links in the docs, the work increase
in documenting two menu layouts shouldn't be much more than the work
increase in implementing them.

> Anyway, scope based and task based literally demand different families of
> menu contents.  You wouldn't be able to just move 'em around.

    Really?  I'd think that most of the activities would be pretty similar.
Do you have a specific example in mind?

> This is one of those things that isn't going to happen, IMHO.  That sounds a
> bit inflammatory, but...well, lets look at it like this.  I'm looking at the
> menus of Micro$oft Outlook Express right now.  I can't, without sitting
> down, writing everything out, and thinking of the inherent scope of each
> menu item decide on a scope-based menuing system for this app.

    Good UI design is almost always hard work :)
    I'd split it up into three discrete scopes: mail, news, and address
book.  Under mail and news there would be read and compose messages (I
shall justify splitting Outlook Express's "Compose a Message" feature
into mail- and news-specific things due to the conceptual difference in
broadcast and uni-/selected multi-cast messages).   After that, things
split up fairly easily and without requiring significant modification,
at least how I would do it (and I think I would prefer a scope-based Tools
menu to the fairly unordered hash that is there now).

> Coders aren't going to do this work.  I, just thinking about it, can't
> really think how they would.

    As a coder, I disagree.  Another person who writes code seconded my
opinion that two sets of menus wouldn't be too hard to do.  Before you
decide that coders won't do this work, perhaps you should ask us. :)

> *NOW*, if we want to have something like Menuthemes, which create alternate
> contexts and orders for menu contents, that's a different story!  Then, the
> coder codes as normal, and the psycho user(grin) who likes scope based gets
> his or her wish.
>
> I mean, if we're already saying sysadmins should be able to disable menu
> items(preferences on netscape *ahem*) and whole menus, why not add stuff?

    I think this is a very good idea.  It would be hard to do well, but it
could make both coders' and users' lives easier in the end.  I'm willing
to think about this, but I don't think I have enough time to write code
for it in the next two weeks.

-- Michael