Re: Micro$oft-style dragable, resizable, stackable menu/button bars.

[jgotts www tqstats com]

In message <388BF8F4.70B40AA7@amazon.com>, Miles Lane writes:

>Specifically, Micro$soft's button/menubars support
>hiding some of the right-hand portion of a tool/menubar.
>For example, is I stack two buttonbars in a single row
>and there isn't room for both bars to be displayed in 
>their entirety, one (or both?) of the bars can be placed
>such that some of the bar buttons scroll off the end of
>the bar.  In place of having everything be visable, this
>symbol ">>" indicates that something is not seen.  Clicking
>on the ">>" symbol scrolls the buttons to the left, unhiding
>the hidden buttons.  Obviously, as the buttons get scrolled,
>a "<<" symbol shows up on the lefthand side of the bar
>so the user can scroll back.

>Also, when a window is resized horizontally, the ">>"
>symbol will appear as the toolbar shrinks to fit in the
>window and a some of the toolbar buttons become hidden.
>This is really quite nicely implemented and works very
>intuitively and smoothly.

Don't take this the wrong way; I'm trying to offer constructive criticism.

See the Interface Hall of Shame for why this is a bad idea:

http://www.iarchitect.com/mshame.htm

The concept of the button bar is that commonly accessed menu items are one
click away versus the two to three clicks required to access a menu item.  When
you introduce the concept of a scrolling button bar you might as well just
force the user to use the menubar, because the utility of the button bar is
completely lost.  Think of the example where the button bar is twice as wide as
the application.  How much time will it take the user to find the icon for his
or her task?  How do you indicate what portion of the virtual button bar is
visible?  And what if you wrap the button bar to a stack of button bars?  How
useful is it to stare at more than a dozen different icons, moving your mouse
from icon to icon trying to discern the function of each from their tooltips?
Since you have to resort to reading text, you might as well use the menubar.

I'm not against new features, but introducing new user interface concepts just
for the technical challenge is a straw man argument when you want your
grandmother to be using GNOME.

I think WinXX is easy to use, but its abuse of button bars (and also tabbed
regions) does not help matters.

John

--
John GOTTS <jgotts@linuxsavvy.com>  http://www.linuxsavvy.com/staff/jgotts