Re: Arlo, a little QA comment regarding your interview withlinux.com

["Ryan Marsh" <ryan butterflysoft org>]

I really like the way M$ did the menus in Office & Windows 2000. At first it
only shows the "short" menu (normal day to day stuff). The last item in each
menu is a chevron symbol pointing down. If you click on the chevron symbol,
the menus change and all of the items that would be in the "long" format are
now shown but slightly grayed to differentiate them from the normal menu
items. You stay in the "long" mode until the menus are closed or lose focus
(I'm not sure what the GTK word for it is).

If you use (click) an item in the "long" menu ~three times (I think the
logic might be more complicated) it will always show up in the short menu.
Also, I have noticed that some items that show up in the short menu but
probably should have been in the long menu seem to disappear from the short
menu (move to the long menu) after a while of nonuse. I believe the logic
behind this might be somwhat complicated.

What I like about this is that the menus are very short (though having more
items than the toolbar) and I can usually find what I want very quickly. If
I don't find what I'm looking for I click the chevron and instantly I see
all of the other options, however the items that were not in the short menu
are a lighter shade of gray. This color difference allows me to scan the
menus very quickly and find what I was looking for. Overall I find it much
faster and easier to naviagte the plethora of options that the Office
applications provide.

Regards,
-ryan

"...visit a dog show. Or a gathering of people who believe they have been
abducted by aliens in UFOs. People are demonstrably insane when it comes to
assessing non-human sentience."
     --Jaron Lanier

----- Original Message -----
From: Liam Quin <liam holoweb net>
To: GNOME GUI <gnome-gui-list gnome org>
Sent: Wednesday, October 25, 2000 5:57 PM
Subject: Re: Arlo, a little QA comment regarding your interview
withlinux.com


> On Wed, Oct 25, 2000 at 03:38:27PM -0700, John Sullivan wrote:
> > Menus are faster. Putting every possible command into a menu is not
> > necessarily the best "design for efficiency" though, because not every
> > command is equally important.
>
> One thing we did at SoftQuad (and that was common on some older Macintosh
> programs) was to have "Advanced" and "Short" menus, with "Short" being
> the default, and a menu item to toggle.
>
> This turned out to be a very popular feature.
>
> Beginning and intermediate tusers would use the shorter menus, and
> as they got more advanced would sometimes enable the extra items.
>
> The choice of what item to put in which menu is very difficult, though.
>
> User configurable menus were less popular, partly because you had to
> spend time configuring them, and partly because it wasn't so easy
> to switch between short (convenient day-to-day) and long (ocasional).
>
> 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
>
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