Re: My GWorkspace feature request

[MJ Ray]

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.

> [...] 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.

[...]
> 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.

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.

[...]
>> 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.

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

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