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

[textshell t-online de]

Ryan Marsh wrote:
> 
> 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).
No, this is evil!!
I recently saw an Word 2000 without an open menu item in file!!!!
And it is not good because it prevents novice users just working with an
application for "accidentialy" discovering new functions. And it  stops
me from finding the options I search, I often don't know where the
progammers put some feature, so i just open the first
pulldown-menu(usualy file) and quickly scan it with my eyes and then
move the mouse to the next one. With menus ala Office 2000 i would
either have to wait much longer to see all options or need to move the
mouse down and click that expand-item.

So my conclusion is that this is just another MS user
distraction(animated menu popup, smooth scrolling in listboxes, etc),
because it wastes the expirenced users time and prevents the novice user
from learing all the feature of a program!!


> 
> 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.
>