Re: User interface suggestions

[Liam Quin <liam holoweb net>]

On Mon, Nov 13, 2000 at 08:16:51PM +0100, Blad, John Erling wrote:
> SPEED BAR
> 
> If something had been marked as "frequent use" then it went
> into the speed bar in addition to it's usual place in the menu.


This is a bit like the MacOS "Recent Applications" menu I think,
except at a finer level.

Some other approaches:
1 give a menu a "default item", that the user can set, and arrange that
  (e.g.) a quick mouse press or a double click does the default action
  instead of showing the menu.  There are some awkwardnesses with this:
  one implementation used a different mouse button to do the default action,
  and previewed its name so you could drag off to cancel.

2 allow people to rearrange menu items by dragging (as per the Start menu
  in Win98).

3 a floating "ferquent menus" pallette - drag menu items or toolbar icons
  into it from any application, and if necessary the application is started
  when you press the button.

A per-application frequently/recently used menu item gadget (remembered
across sessions) might be very interesting.

A "floating pallette" (3) would be more useful if you could drag a piece
of text from a text entry, label, window title or wherever and drop it
onto te "File Open" icon in a toolbar, or onto an "Open" entry in a menu.

Right now, gtk isn't really high level enough for that sort of behaviour
to work well, I think.  You want a concept of a "command request object"
such as (open-file "filename" "name of requesting task"), or maybe
something like the CDE ToolTalk protocol going on.

Lee

-- 
Liam Quin - Barefoot in Toronto - liam holoweb net - http://www.holoweb.net/
Ankh: irc.sorcery.net www.valinor.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org www.advogato.org
author, The Open Source XML Database Toolkit, Wiley, August 2000
Co-author, The XML Specification Guide, Wiley, 1999