Re: Menu Guidelines

[zinie cs unibo it]

On Wed, Jun 27, 2001 at 04:08:55AM +0200, Guillermo S. Romero / Familia Romero wrote:

> Sometimes I want to kill all windows of a given type, even if they
> still work. If you do not want, it is your choice, but some people may
> find it useful, cos Mozilla is not the only app out there.

I'm not saying people should not have a way to kill Mozilla (or Abiword,
or whatever), but I'm saying that that is not a good place to put that
feature.


> Uuum, you said Gimp? Here is a real life example: have some NS windows
> open (and eating RAM like pigs), start Gimp, do some serious job (the
> one that starts eating swap), nuke NS in one step, more RAM for Gimp.

Yes, it could be useful, but why nuke NS?  Perhaps you have another memory
hog running and you don't know it, and perhaps there are some web pages in
NS that you'd rather not close.

Isn't it better to have, for administrative purposes like closing memory
hogs or killing hung applications, an ad-hoc tool like, say, the windows
NT task manager, that allows you to sort your running applications by
memory or CPU usage and close what you don't want with a couple of clicks?

In that way you could have consistency with this 'an application window
per document' MDI style, and have a more effective way to do your
housekeeping.

Is it technically possible to group all the Mozilla (or Abiword, etc.)
windows that belongs to the same Mozilla application, show a list of these
groups and send some quit event to one of them?  I'm thinking of a 'Quit
App' button placed not in the application itself, but in this "application
manager", together with a 'Kill App' button to use when the whole
application hangs.


> No, buy more RAM or fix NS are not solutions, maybe I do not have the
> money, and maybe the task eats RAM even if correctly coded. I just
> though I could keep it open, but then discover I can not, so I want it
> to go away.

Why are you speaking in this way?  Is this the idea I gave you, that I was
going to say 'buy more RAM or fix NS'?  Well, the first of these two
options belongs to economics and the second one to coding.  Even if I
might not be as experienced as most people here, I'm here to talk about
usability.  I want to make it clear, since I'm not a native english
writer, so that it could avoid possible misinterpretations of what I want
to say.


> <rant>
> But of course, I can also use the advanced approach: killall in a
> term. It is just my imagination of the trend is that GUI should be
> limited, "cos you can always do it guru style, no?". I comment it cos
> everytime I say GUI should allow freedom, I get a reply saying that as
> I want to do lots of things, I should not use GUI at all, as if I am
> not allowed to use full GUI, or mix of GUI and others cos I do not
> want to do the typical things. :]
> </rant>

Of course the user can't be forced to open a terminal and play with
killall, for similar tasks.  But for that very same reason I'm against the
'Quit app' option as a solution for memory or CPU hogs.

Doesn't the 'Quit app' button imply that the user should have an idea of
what the application is, and that he understands that the application is
not the window he sees, but another thing behind the scenes that opens all
these (not necessarily) similar windows with all these unrelated
documents?


Bye, Enrico

--
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