RE: Menus (was RE: Shortcuts ??)

["Robert J. Slover" <slover Rose-Hulman Edu>]

To answer someone's question about the Mac 'Mid-Level Selectable' menus,
*all* menus that the original poster was talking about can be selected.
There is therefore no need to distinguish between selectable and non
selectable cascading menus.  Note, however, that he is talking about a
special case menu (the Apple Menu, or long ago, 'Desk Accessories'). For
the modern Apple menu, every menu item (with the exception of 'About'
entries) has a one-to-one correspondance to a filesystem object or alias
to one.  The menu entries are built up by building a nested directory
structure.  Windblows 95 copied this to an extent.  Even the Windoze 
trick of dragging an icon onto the menu to add it is an extension of a
common Mac trick...place a (graphically) invisible alias icon to the 
root Apple Menu folder onto the desktop directly below the Apple Menu.
To add the item, just make an alias and drag it onto the invisible icon.

I agree that the 'shortcut' feature is related, but think it is more
general.  Giving some visual clue to the user would be a really good
thing...but the entire feature might clash with some menuing styles.
The NeXT style menus in Afterstep have the nice feature of making the
cascaded menu the 'current' one and losing the parent(s) when the user
clicks on the parent item.  I'd think this is similar to the way some
pie menus work.  Just another consideration....

------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Robert J. Slover | Admin Sys Mgr | Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology
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