Re: [Usability] New Menubars

[Philip Ganchev <phil ganchev gmail com>]

Hi Anton and everybody,

(It's nice to see some more Bulgarians here :-)

This sounds like something I wanted to propose for a long time: a text
search for menu items, to make it easier to find the menu items you
need, and also easier to execute functions provided by the menu; so it
is more humane for both experts and novices.  The matching items could
appear as a drop-down list under the search box.[1] This is especially
useful for programs that have many menu items, such as office suites
and Gimp, but is useful for any program because the interaction is
standard and easy. Ideally, it would appear as part of the GTK menu
bar, so all GTK programs would have it. Cocoa programs apparently have
this.

I wrote a proposal for Open Office.[1] There was a lot of interest[2]
but it has not been implemented. The UX team suggested that it should
be implemented at a higher level, so that it would work under any
program in Gnome, KDE or Windows.[3] But is that possible?

[1]    http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/User_Experience/Command_search
[2]    http://ux.openoffice.org/servlets/BrowseList?listName=discuss&from=2124105&to=2124105&count=59&by=thread&first=1&windowSize=1000
[2]    http://ux.openoffice.org/servlets/BrowseList?list=discuss&by=thread&from=2174923


On Tue, Apr 14, 2009 at 7:42 AM, Alex Railean <ralienpp gmail com> wrote:
[...]
> 1. what about nested menus, will they appear as a drop-down list or do
>    you plan them to be "flattened" onto the menu area?

We can show both the standard menu and a separate list of menu items
that match the query. Then as you select each match (with the arrow
keys or with the mouse), the relevant menu in the menu bar can be
highlighted.

> 2. do you think it is acceptable to use ALT as a trigger to set the
>   focus to the input window?
>
>   Today we press Alt+<letter> to access a particular menu entry, so
>   why not make it Alt+<first N letters> to naturally extend the
>   existing method?
>
>   It will be in conflict with the fact that for some menu entries the
>   Alt+<letter> key is not always the first letter of the menu item.

The search should be invokable with the keyboard, otherwise you have
to switch between keyboard and mouse, which is slow.  We can use
Alt+letter for the standard menu and "Alt (release) letter" for the
search. Or instead, say, F7.

Anton replied:
$ It would be good but  as many of the gnome desktops
$ are translated in many languages and people use
$ mainly English (as me) these shortcuts are not working.
$ So a good thing will be that it exist another visual
$ manner involving the mouse.

You mean if you are using the English version of Gnome, but your
keyboard is set to output Cyrillic characters? The humane solution is
for the search box to and ask for the app's native language input
characters (English in this example), as if the user had switched the
input status temporarily. But that might be a pain to implement.

>   Also, not to say that Vista is a perfect example to follow, but in
>   there they hide menus by default and Alt shows/hides it [...]

That would be nice in Gnome, to save screen space. If not by default,
at least an easy way to make the menus hide automatically until Alt is
pressed.