Second image:
http://stefan.agentfarms.net/Download/GNUstep/Prototypes/Etoile/
Desktop-layout-prototype-2.png
Shows "menu shortcuts". The menu commands can be dragged and dropped
into dedicated panel. The panel can be docked too. So I can D&D
frequently used commands. Again, menu contents is not going to be
duscussed here ;)
I really like this idea. This is similar to what I was trying to go for
with the "buffer" in this image:
http://jesseross.com/clients/gnustep/ui/concepts/01/ui.png
The "buffer" is the location where you see "Google", "The Linux
Desk..." and "Jesse Ross". A lot of people thought that this was a
taskbar-like area and that those were minimized windows, but that's not
the case. I imagined that area to be more like a clipboard where you
could drag and drop _anything_. For example, the one marked "Google" is
the result of dragging a URL to the "buffer". Single clicking on it
would treat it like a shortcut and open a browser to Google. The second
one and third one are both text snippets which, when clicked, would
insert the content of the text snippet into whatever text field had
focus. I imagine exactly the same thing could be done with color
swatches, people, documents, or, as you suggest, menu items.
The only place where I could see problems with this is that we
currently have a "standard" that when someone presses down on a menu
item, but pulls the mouse away and releases outside of the menu item,
that action is not activated. In your case, doing that same sequence of
events may not activate the action, but it might make a duplicate of
the menu item outside of the root menu. We may want to detail how we
would compensate for that. Having a single dedicated "shortcut menu"
might be the fix, but it might also be handy to be able to create
tear-off menus items, not just tear off menus.
Very cool idea, though.
J.
