Re: Applications Unnecessary?

[Anton Kerezov <ankere gmail com>]

On Mon, May 4, 2009 at 9:57 PM, Greg K Nicholson <greg gkn me uk> wrote:

OK. I couldn't see this from just the one picture.

I have a similar idea myself. The two-paragraph version: the user
types the name of either an object (a document, person, disk…) or an
action into a command line (which is presented like a browser's
location bar). There's a drop-down list showing available options
(visible as soon as the command line is focused) and objects/actions
are matched like Gnome Do does. After pressing Enter, the user chooses
from a list of actions (if they entered an object) or objects (if they
entered an action) in the same way. If another parameter is needed,
this is then chosen in the same way. This is intended to be like
natural-language parsing but more structured.

Commands (combinations of object + action + parameter) that are deemed
the most relevant (for this user) are shown as toolbar icons to the
left of the command line (right for RTL). Closely-related groups of
slightly-less-relevant commands are grouped in drop-down menus after
these icons (but before the command line).

This sounds sane. I would go for it and implement it if I knew how to code :) Unfortunately I'm an artist and don't know how (at least not as deep as this kind of programming requires) to build it. I only imagine this as one paragraph and the CLI being dynamically resized depending of the needs (It should generally stay short as the commands should do too). Expansion in two rows would be in case of many commands (preferably done with nice animations that help the user).

 

> That would be good compromise but only a compromise.

It's not a compromise: it's only the first part of the solution.

I meant using the old menus for doing that task but indeed it is a good step to categorize the items properly.

 

The menu titles—not the menu items. Toolbar items (see step 3) without
icons are quite unusual and (I think) would be less inviting for new
users. Icons on menu items is a different issue.

Ok my mistake :) not reading slow enough. Btw windows 7 is introducing text only toolbar items but I'm not sure that this will stay as it is in the final release but there is a chance as speed the their first goal this time as should be ours because in the survey I held about 300-400 people want theri desktop to be very fast, robust.
 

>> (3) Fold all the menus into the toolbar, as toolbar buttons with
>> expansion-arrows
>
> Not good IMO.

Well, this is the crux of the solution: I'm merging the menu bar into
the toolbar. Is there a problem this would lead to that I've not
addressed? Or do you simply prefer another solution (and if so, why)?

That is me fast reading again. But how is this different form a menubar with images? I think that text-only is better in this case. Iamages are not good becaue the rules about making programs should be very tight to enfore every app to have exactly the same images for Certain types of operations. What about programs with a lot of custom menus?

I would rather like to see a toolbox on top of each program that is context sensitive to the contents in the window so if you have a image in it (edit mode) a tools form gimp would appear and if you have text a text formatting tools would appear (no save and such as this is done automatically and tranparently). and if you have audio -audio tools and so on. I was influence by this idea on Gnome Live :

http://live.gnome.org/BrianMuhumuza/ToPaZ

Another interesting idea is this:
http://live.gnome.org/ScratchPad/UIByTheUser

PS: I know that some of you may have read this but I wanted to point them out.


Anton

-- 
A.K.