On 10 March 2000, [EMAIL PROTECTED] said:
> I have worked with CAD for many years (right from the days when 640x480 res
> was considered good), and personally, I like to 1) have the menu readily
> accessible without having to move the mouse to the top of the window all
> the time (over an 8 hr period of continuous CAD work this makes a big
> difference), and 2) not having the drawing area taken up by toolbars and
> menus etc. (I'm sure that anyone who has worked with Microstation will
> agree that having a drawing window to... well.. draw in, is really great -
> if only it had right button menus).
>
> So, IMHO, I like the way GIMP and DIA work with the menus and hope that it
> stays.
I don't know if there are any UI standards for the Gnome project that
would guide how this ought to be done (I sure hope there are!), but one
of the very few good ideas to emerge from MS Windows is that the right
button gives you a menu *specific to the current object*. (Windows'
other good idea is a keyboard-controllable GUI.) This is a pretty
well-recognized convention by now, and even though I use Windows *very*
rarely, I think that it's a good one -- and I'd like to see it on my
Linux/Solaris desktop.
My other argument against having the full program menus as a
right-button pop-up is that it's *such* a pain to access features that
are three levels deep. Arguably this is a flaw in the menu structure:
in particular, the alignment options are really buried. (I think Dia
has the worst UI for alignment I've seen; I recommend taking a look at
how Applix Graphics does it. Applix doesn't get many things right in
their graphics package, but the alignment dialog is really nice.
Basically, you have a dialog with horizontal alignment options down one
side, vertical alignment options down the other, and pictures in the
middle explaining them. You can "Ok" to align the current set of
objects and shut the dialog, "Apply" to align the current set of objects
and leave the dialog open, or "Cancel" to shut the dialog. This is
*great*, because you pick your alignment settings once, and apply them
repeatedly to various sets of objects. Doing this in Dia is a right
royal pain in the bottom.)
Anyways, it's clear that having a menubar along the top should be
optional, but because it's a convention that has been well established
for something like two decades now, it should be the default.
Greg
--
Greg Ward - software developer [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Corporation for National Research Initiatives
1895 Preston White Drive voice: +1-703-620-8990
Reston, Virginia, USA 20191-5434 fax: +1-703-620-0913
