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

[Gregory Leblanc <gleblanc cu-portland edu>]

jgotts@www.tqstats.com wrote:
> 
> 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.

I agree that it doesn't make much sense for button bars, but I think the
talk behind this was menu bars, which are a bit of a different deal. 
Also, while it doesn't make sense to allow button bars to overlap, it
does make sense to allow multiple button bars to be positioned
horisontally next to each other (assuming that the buttons are in a
horisontal bar).  The same goes for vertical button bars, and menu bars
(which you should be able to drag-n-drop to any alignment, no?).  I
haven't read the page, but I'm going to do that in just a minute.
	Greg