Re: Bugs & Probs with the panel.

[Nate Riffe <inkblot goose inkblot ml org>]

On Thu, 28 May 1998, Caolan McNamara wrote:

[snipety snip]

>another little HCI gotcha is menus, if theres more entries on the menu than 
>fits on the screen there should be the capacity to scroll the menu so that you
>can select any of the entries, you can see that xaw doesnt have any
>cunning way to do this so for instance on my machine with loads
>of fonts i cant select past the ones beginning with c with xfontsel as they 
>are listed in a menu thats too long to fit on screen. i havent tried
>any long menus in gtk yet, does it have a scroll mechanism ?, or like
>netscapes motif menus an automatic break menu into multiple menus
>linked with a cascade menu entry at the end of the menu, which is a
>rather niftier mechanism.

this is not really a menu, but for example:  go to www.weather.com in
netscape for linux (or any motif?) and pick a state to look for weather in
(the selection box is near the bottom of the page).  fifty states is too
many...

[$0.02 added here]

anyway, the "more..." does solve the problems of having a long menu, but i
don't like this solution.  i think scrolling is more intuitive, not to
mention consistent.  also, though splitting works for long menus, will it
work for _really_ long menus, say a font menu like Caolan's but with more
fonts?  i've seen some in netscape that go on to create a menu four or
five levels deep.  also, here at depaul u., the lab computers run win95
and have a "courseware" item on the start menu that has >100 entries,
mostly submenus.  the courseware menu takes up the whole damn screen by
itself and the submenus (when opened) make it worse.  the secondary
problem with menu-splitting is that there's debris all over the screen. 
scrolling solves the original problem and does not leave debris.  the
secondary problem with scolling menus though, is that there is necessarily
an order imposed on the menu items, such as alphabetical or chronological
(i.e. recent documents) order.  finding a menu item on an unordered
scrolling menu is counterproductive.  i don't know how one might go about
solving that problem, but in general i would rather scroll.

-nate

>
>C.
>
>Real Life: Caolan McNamara           *  Doing: MSc in HCI
>Work: Caolan.McNamara@ul.ie          *  Phone: +353-61-202699
>URL: http://skynet.csn.ul.ie/~caolan *  Sig: an oblique strategy
>Do something boring
>
>
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------------------------------------------------------- ((\))< --------
is it just me or is windows really only a thin client for unix servers?

nate riffe (<--hey that's me!)
inkblot@goose.inkblot.ml.org