Re: Unwanted behavior with menu item accelerators

[Calum Benson <calum benson ireland sun com>]

January Weiner 3 wrote:

> I don't know of any undo's working really well, maybe with the notable exception
> (to some extent) of Adobe Photoshop. But I know what you mean.

Yes, it's a difficult thing to get right.  Photoshop's Undo mechanism is
certainly powerful, but it's not exactly intuitive-- although it's good
that you can also use it at the simple "hit ^Z to undo the last thing
you did" level, which is all most users need.

It's important to remember that undo isn't just about pressing ^Z
either, though-- for example, if you start dragging something with the
mouse, you should always be able to press Esc before you let go to
"undo" the start of the drag operation, if you realise you're dragging
the wrong thing. Or be able to drop the thing you're dragging onto a
well-signposted "dead area" of the screen to cancel the drag.

> Well, so what? You just type something that comes to your mind, and *this*
> will be a truly intuitive shortcut.

True  :)  Provided you realise what you've done, and how the shortcut
assignments work.  It's not inconceivable that a user unfamiliar with
gtk apps could change a shortcut by mistake, though, and then find out
later that one of his shortcuts had just "stopped working".

> Well. If I were blind, I would stay away from Linux :-( 

Things are starting to happen on that front, though, and not just with
the GNOME accessibility project.  There are other efforts out there
making Linux accessible to the blind and vision impaired too-- for
example:
http://leb.net/blinux
http://ocularis.sourceforge.net 
http://www.speechinfo.org/fdawg

> I don't know about the animated arrow, never seen it.

Well, basically it's a big flashing, moving arrow pointing to the Start
button on the Windows taskbar the first time you log on, accompanied by
some text saying "you need to press this to do anything".  Or words to
that effect  :)

> I agree, though I still have to think through the consequences of what I
> just said. OTOH, I really only care whether a feature suits me, and I don't
> care much whether this feature will make Linux more popular or not. Sorry.

No need to apologise, that's a perfectly valid thing to care about in
our open source world  :)  Unfortunately if too many of those sorts of
features make it back into the mainstream release of the software, it's
sort of inevitable that usability will eventually begin to suffer. 
Which is a problem that not too many of the really big open source
projects have got completely under control yet, IMHO.

> That is where I found the HIG. I did not find the rest of the resources
> particularly interesting or profound, but I skipped a few.

Well, I'd summarise the points of interest in the other guidelines
listed on the website as follows:

- the Indigo Magic guidelines have some unique and interesting
guidelines for 3D user interfaces
- the Windows guidelines are probably the most extensive, albeit not to
everybody's taste
- the Java guidelines discuss the results of some of the usability tests
that were carried out when the look-and-feel decisions were being made
- the Motif guidelines... well, they're just not very interesting :)

> Hm, I'll take a look at the prices. I make money with genetic alterations
> made in bacteria (jj :-) ) and not with programming, so I have always a
> problem buying a book on that topic.

There are one or two free online "books" floating around too, like Joel
Spolsky's "UI Design for programmers" at
http://static.userland.com/gems/joel/uibookcomplete.htm ... 

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson ireland sun com    Desktop Engineering Group
http://www.sun.ie                      +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems