--- Alan Horkan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > On Wed, 28 Aug 2002, Hubert Figuiere wrote: > > > Instead I propose to only include 5-8 MRU items in > the font pulldown > > menu (organized alphabetically, to organize by > recency of use will > > probably only serve to confuse), then a seperator > then "Other Fonts..." > > probably? > anything to back this up?
Yes. It's a known fact (at least by computer interface guys) that MRU usually causes more harm than good. The problem is that if the menu items (or combo box items, etc) are not fixed, the user has no oportunities at all to *remember* where this or that item was. For instance, in recent versions of word, the menus only show the most used items. More than half the time when the menu popups I spend ~2 seconds just to scan the list of items (one after one) just to see if my item is already there. When I discover that it's not there, I expand the menu and then I rescan the whole list (usually faster, because when the menu has its full size I know more or less where is the item than I'm looking for) To be honest, now I've developped a kind of "open menu" = "click on menu item, go down to the little arrow and expand the menu", which makes things go faster but it's still 2-3 times slower than the old approach. That "feature" is just an idea to solve a real problem (menus/combos contains too much items), but that unfortunately doesn't work. I like much more the Seth idea for the font list. Maybe the list of "main" fonts should be parametrizable by the user, but don't let the computer change it all the time. > Most recently used makes sense to be ordered by most > recently used. > how about a comparison to what Word does? If Word > orders MRU by MRU > which i think it does then taking a differnt > approach really requires > some backup. That approach was probed to be wrong long before MS implemented it. Everybody is still wondering why they did it... (it works well for me when the menu is stable enough, for instance for the "Start->Programs" menu, but don't extrapolate it to applications menus). Cheers, ===== Joaquin Cuenca Abela [EMAIL PROTECTED] __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Finance - Get real-time stock quotes http://finance.yahoo.com
