RE: panel menu functionality...

[Jörg Rathlev <joerg jrsoftware de>]

> > What about developing an 'in-place-menu-editor' that gets
> activated using
> > the context menu, activates the drag feature and keeps the menu open
> > (similar to MS Office)? It should also display a message box somewhere
> > (somewhere meaning not covering the menu :-) ) where you can
> click Finish
> to
> > commit the changes and Cancel to cancel editing.

> Activation of this needs discussing, but the idea would be to
> have a dialog
> pop up and the menu itself stay open as it would normally, but not respond
> to clicks normally, rather allow movement, adding and removing of items?

Yes, excatly.

Where MS Office uses a list of commands within the dialog, the GNOME menu of
course has the normal file manager, since we are adding / editing shortcuts
to files. It could be argued whether shortcuts dragged away from the menu
should be deleted, or moved to where you are dragging them.


Jörg


P.S., for those of you who don't use MS Office, here's a more detailed
description of how it works:

I right-click the menu bar (or a tool bar). A menu pops up where I can
toggle the visibility of all available toolbars. The last item in the menu
is "Anpassen" (probably "Customize" in english versions). If I click that
one, a cutomize dialog appears which has - among other things - a tab with
all available commands.

Clicking on menu items in edit mode works like this: It selects the menu
item (selection is shown not by using the highlight color, but by drawing a
rectangle around the item - probably to make it look different to normal
selection). If the item has a submenu, clicking will also toggle the
visibility of the submenu. (But only one submenu will be shown at a time, so
if I click "File" first and then "Edit" only the edit menu will be shown.
The same is for sub-submenus and so on.)

I can also drag menu items around. Dragging them out of a menu will cause
them to be deleted, visually indicated by a (too) small little X appearing
next to the mouse cursor.

In edit mode, each item also has a context menu, where you can say whether a
new group should start here (meaning a separator will appear before the
item), delete the item etc. You can also rename the item, but the interface
is really bad: It's an edit field appearing *in the item's context menu*. I
think it should rather be a command "Rename" which makes an in place edit
field appear where the item to be renamed is.

I find this way of customizing menus to be very easy to use. The only
drawback of Office is that it does not offer a Cancel button in the edit
dialog. You can only reset to the factory defaults. But maybe this was
intentionally - at least, if you're writing an email to a competitor's UI
discussion mailing list, it successfully keeps you from testing whether the
Del key works to delete an item or not :)