Re: My GWorkspace feature request

[Philippe C.D. Robert]

On Thu, 19 Jun 2003, Raffael Herzog wrote:
> On 2003-06-19 12:20:21 +0200 Philippe C.D. Robert <probert@sgi.com> wrote:
>
> > On Thu, 19 Jun 2003, MJ Ray wrote:
> >> 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.
>
>Please, don't repeat the mistakes all the others do. KDE and GNOME broke their
>UIs to imitate Windoze. Apple broke the NeXT UI to a certain extent to imitate
>the good old Macintosh. Let's not break GNUstep's UI to imitate whatever.

I am not aware that this discussion is about adding a new UI element or
breaking the UI. Contextual menus are already part of Cocoa as well as GNUstep.

> Let's have a look at my parents: They both use Macintosh for... well, since I
> know that such a thing like computers exists. ;-) But they never, ever, use
> the context menus introduced in... OS8?. They know that something like that
> exists, but they don't use it. They don't need it. They don't want to think
> about it, they only want to use their applications as they always did.
>
> *If* we introduce context menus, then this should be something for advanced
> users who know the application very well. But all the functionality should be
> availabe without using them. Using an application shouldn't be a "find the
> right context menu" adventure game, IMHO.

I agree 100% with you on this.

> I didn't know that this context menu in GWorkspace exists and I never missed
> it. In the seldom cases I want to open a file using a tool different to the
> default one, I just take the straight-forward way: Open the tools inspector
> and choose the tool there. And I'll most probably continue to do so since I
> need this very seldomly, so I probably won't remember the context menu the
> next time I'm in such a situation.

Nobody should be forced to use context menus, they should enable an easy and
quick way of accessing functionality provided by a specific context. This
said, I think you are right in saying that the functionality should as well
be accessible through the application menu or other GUI elements.

-Phil
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