Re: Look and Feel

[M. Uli Kusterer]

At 10:37 Uhr +0100 15.02.2005, Markus Hitter wrote:
> The big advantage, supported by research results, of a menu attached 
> to a screen edge is, you have to adjust your mouse movement in one 
> direction only, in the other direction the screen border is your 
> guide.  Horizontal menus on the top border reduce the required 
> accuracy of mouse movement even further, because the size of the 
> menu normal to the required movement is typically bigger.
>
> This is always an advantage but competes with the need of a possibly 
> very long mouse movement on large screens.

So, could one perhaps just "dock" the palettized menu in the 
upper-left corner by default? Then we'd have two screen edges to stop 
the mouse arrow, thus making it even easier to hit. And users with 
large screens could tear off the menu from its screen edge and move 
it closer to where their windows are.

It's still a more complex mouse movement than just ramming the mouse 
into the top of the screen, and since menu titles are arranged 
vertically and they're less tall than wide it also requires some more 
savvy as a menu bar (where they're arranged horizontally and thus 
each target is easier to hit because they're wider than high).

OTOH the NeXT-style menu palette is:

- still reasonably easy to navigate
- more flexible because it can be torn off, which aids on large 
screens (which more and more people have these days). You can't tear 
off a menu bar because it isn't compact enough, and when *not* at the 
edge of the screen, such a small, wide window is actually *harder* to 
hit.
- more distinct, and thus good for GNUstep's brand image

Another point that frequently confuses people on the Mac is that, 
when an app with no open windows is frontmost, the menu bar is the 
only thing that indicates this. The window that is actually frontmost 
belongs to an inactive app. With a palette menu, this could be easily 
solved. Instead of hiding the menu window of a non-frontmost app, 
make it appear inactive. Thus, when people place the menu palettes in 
different places on the screen, they see this active menu palette as 
the frontmost window, and realize what the frontmost app actually is.
--
Cheers,
M. Uli Kusterer
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