Re: My GWorkspace feature request

[MJ Ray]

Pete French <pete@twisted.org.uk> wrote:
> Doesnt OSX do this though ? [...]

I think that is irrelevant.  OSX is not optimal.  (Right now, neither is
GNUstep, but we can improve GNUstep...)

> Conmtentual menus may be bad - but in a windows world users actually *expect*
> them oddly enough. [...]

I don't think GNUstep should sacrifice its best ideas for the sake of
accommodating users who have learnt mistakes.  We are, to a degree, immune
to market forces and can afford to do the right thing for tomorrow instead
of reacting to what people expect today.  (Currenly, the time taken over
GNUstep suggests that we *need* to do the right thing for tomorrow,
because we're not ready to ship today.)  If we are right, then people
will come to expect consistency.  I think we got this one right.

Aside: Yes, I am a little upset that people want to break GNUstep to
mimic legacy systems.  I returned to GNUstep mainly because GNOME broke
their interface horribly to mimic Windows.  Please don't repeat that.

I suspect naive, undamaged users expect consistency and have problems
with menus whose entries change and move around.  It's only anecdotal
suspicion from watching novice and infrequent users at the local college,
though: does anyone on-list know the work on that well enough to give
references?

Maybe we should make the menus as easy to remember as keyboard layouts,
but would you use a keyboard whose letters moved around depending on
what you just typed?  That's what context menus do to the user.

-- 
MJR/slef   My Opinion Only and possibly not of any group I know.
      http://mjr.towers.org.uk/   jabber://slef@jabber.at
Creative copyleft computing services via http://www.ttllp.co.uk/
       Thought: "Changeset algebra is really difficult."