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Re: My GWorkspace feature request
From: |
Philippe C . D . Robert |
Subject: |
Re: My GWorkspace feature request |
Date: |
Sun, 22 Jun 2003 19:34:15 +0200 |
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
- Re: My GWorkspace feature request, (continued)
- Re: My GWorkspace feature request, Philippe C . D . Robert, 2003/06/19
- Re: My GWorkspace feature request, Fabien VALLON, 2003/06/19
- Message not available
- Re: My GWorkspace feature request, MJ Ray, 2003/06/21
- Re: My GWorkspace feature request, Pete French, 2003/06/21
- Re: My GWorkspace feature request, MJ Ray, 2003/06/21
- Re: My GWorkspace feature request, Pete French, 2003/06/21
- Re: My GWorkspace feature request,
Philippe C . D . Robert <=
Re: My GWorkspace feature request, MJ Ray, 2003/06/19
RE: My GWorkspace feature request, Mondragon, Ian, 2003/06/19
Re: My GWorkspace feature request, Raffael Herzog, 2003/06/20
Re: My GWorkspace feature request, MJ Ray, 2003/06/21
Re: My GWorkspace feature request, MJ Ray, 2003/06/23