Re: My GWorkspace feature request

[Philippe C . D . Robert]

On Saturday, June 21, 2003, at 01:13 PM, MJ Ray wrote:
> Philippe C.D. Robert <probert@sgi.com> wrote:
> > I do not ignore anything, I just fail to understand your reasoning. 
> > As we
> > discuss contextual menus I am not talking about invisible global 
> > (sub)menus or
> > whatever you are referring to.
>
> You do pointedly ignore it.  Context menus are invisible menus with
> shifting geography and will always be unavoidably slower to use than
> the main ones.

I do not, at least not intentionally. Contextual menus are as much 
hidden as any other submenu of the app's menu. And it is definitely 
faster to point-click an object directly than to select it and move the 
mouse to the app's menu and find/select the submenu of choice.

> > [...] All I am saying is that with contextual menus > you can provide
> functionality specific to the object you point at right at the > 
> moment.
>
> The object you point at, or the object you selected?  If you are going 
> to
> have context menus, you have to deal with things like that too and will
> probably always confuse people.

What is your point, the correct way of dealing with submenus is covered 
by the API specs. If this is done in a clean way then users will not be 
confused.

> > And yes, there is a gain here, because it accelerates the process of
> > interacting with the application. I am not talking about simple apps 
> > here,
> > I am talking about apps having a lot of menu entries, think of 
> > something in
> > the size of Photoshop and you will see that using too many inspectors 
> > and
> > deep menu structures is not (always) the way to go.
>
> A non-simple application is an application with a bad interface.  
> Context
> menus slow the user interaction by making the user hunt for the "right"
> thing that has the menu with the option that they want.  Any 
> application
> which has them is probably already not simple enough.

The opposite is true, you operate on objects not on menus. You never 
"hunt" for any menu, if you interact with a particular object you are 
interested in bringing up the contextual menu from this and only this 
object. This has nothing to do with application simplicity or whatever 
else.

> I haven't used Photoshop for a long time.  Apart from the context menus
> and GTK+ sillinesses, GIMP appears to be a reasonable attempt at a user
> interface for a graphics package, with its panels and so on.

Well, IMHO Gimp uses its menus quite strangely. In fact it uses a 
different menu than the main menu when turning it on via mouse click. 
But since this is not contextual but rather "everything in one menu 
with some exceptions..." I do not call that intuitive or well designed. 
On the other hand, we are not talking about Gimp here, aren't we :-)

> > > Are you saying that you want items on the pop-up menu that are not 
> > > on the
> > > global menu?  That would be Evil, Bad and Wrong, as well as 
> > > inconsistent.
> > Yes I am, or at least not in the same structure. And it would not be 
> > Evil,
> > Bad, Wrong or inconsistent, it would/can be a useful addition to a 
> > gui if
> > used properly. This includes that such menus are part of the gui 
> > guidelines
> > so that users are familiar with the concept.
>
> This is EBW.  A GNUstep virtue is that the main menu is consistent and
> comprehensive.  That must not be sacrificed, regardless of what happens
> to the UI guide.

The fact that *you* call it 'EWB' does not mean that it is 'EWB'. And I 
can only repeat myself, contextual menus do not alter or negatively 
affect the application main menu. If they do then it's the developer's 
fault, and has IMHO nothing to do with the overall concept of 
contextual menus.

> OK, who's paying you to screw GNUstep's interface over?  Are we 
> finally worrying the other desktops?  ;-)

Well, I don't know you, but I think one can call me a big NEXTSTEP fan, 
especially because of its UI concepts and style - but still I am open 
for good inventions, useful additions and enhancements. And while I 
hope that GNUstep one day will be a good successor to NEXTSTEP/OPENSTEP 
I also hope that it continues to evolve, and this certainly includes 
the UI as well.

-Phil
--
Philippe C.D. Robert
http://www.nice.ch/~phip