Re: NeXTGtk ?

[Gleef <gleef capital net>]

I hate scrolling menus.  I hate menus with 'More' at the end.  There are
many things that are annoying about them in general (takes longer to do
what you want, etc), but there is one FATAL flaw that keeps either of them
from being acceptable in a well-designed GUI, which GNOME aspires to have.

In both cases, if what you are looking for cannot be displayed on the
first batch of menu items, the scrolldown arrow or the "More" tag will be
found on the bottom.  There is no other place that makes sense to put
them, anything else will be even more confusing.  Many applications and
window manager features think that they are so important that they must be
always on top, I'll use a taskbar in this example, but the problem is by
no means limited to taskbars.  Now, since this taskbar knows that people
will be annoyed if it is covering windows, it generally installs itself
along the edge of the screen, typically along the bottom.  When the menu
gets displayed, the taskbar is insisting that it must be on top, so the
menu is displayed on a lower level.  The taskbar (or other window) is now
COVERING the scrolldown arrow or "More" tag.  You now cannot use the other
part of the menu without going through gyrations.

The solution cannot be "don't let the taskbar do that".  It may not be a
taskbar, it may be the new statusbar feature from the latest closed source
version of StarOffice 12, or whatever.  GNOME cannot assume that anything
below the bottom border of the application window is visible, and both
versions of 'long menu' solutions typically expand to fill the available
space, regardless of whether or not it is visible, because there really is
no way to check reliably.

The right solution is "don't make long menus".  A menu should have a
static length.  Individual items within a menu may change dynamically,
(eg, the 'last four documents editied' items in the File menus of the
Microsoft Office applications).  However, if there is the opportunity
for a list of items to grow boundlessly, a menu is the wrong way of going
about it.  Use a combo list or some other way of controlling how the list
is accessed.

I personally would like to see a item in the GNOME style guide that no
menus should be taller than 400 pixels or the minimum window height
(whichever is taller) using the default GNOME font.  This will allow for
people running on 640x480 screens with stuff it to have minimal risk of
problems along these lines.

-Gleef