Menu Bar Style Guide

[Marko Macek <Marko Macek snet fri uni-lj si>]

Hi!

I'd like to make two suggestions about menu bars:

1) All options should be single word unless absolutely necessary.
English should be no problem, but translations might. In that case the
spacing
between separate items should be increased slightly IMO.

2) Help menu should not be right aligned. Currently this is very
iconsistent between current apps. Most use left aligned, but several do
not.

Why not Help on the right?

Right aligned Help menu makes sense on the Mac where the menu bar is
on top on the screen and Help menu is always in the same place, and 
therefore quickly accessible.

When IBM/Microsoft made the CUA/Windows gui guidelines they probably
cloned this aspect of Mac GUI. But since menubars can be anywhere on the
screen, the
advantage is lost and the position of the help menu is just
inconvenient/distant from other menu items. 

I have also notices that some people do not notice the existance of the
Help menu very soon because it is separate (I even miss it myself if the
window 
is large).

Since OS/2 2.0 and Windows95+ the Help menu is no longer right aligned
and
is more easily accessible while navigating the menus. This makes a lot
of
sense.

3) Help|About should be the last item in the Help menu and it should
have
a separator above it. If there are multiple About XXX items, there
should 
be a separator above all of them only. (If there are several standard
About items we should specify the recommended order for them).

Mark
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Marko.Macek@snet.fri.uni-lj.si      http://ixtas.fri.uni-lj.si/~markom/