On 6 May 2006, at 20:31, Chris Vetter wrote:
Well, of course it's your prerogative to decide how the menus are implemented, but IMHO "useful" is partly based on common sense, logic(al thinking), taste and to some degree what you're used to.
True
While it's true that putting Services below Info reduces availability, my personal taste is having an "uncluttered" main menu -- the less main entries, the better.
From a usability standpoint this is incorrect. Ideally, the menu should have as many top level items as can exist while maintaining consistency, and fitting in available screen real-estate. Hitting a menu at the top of the screen is very easy to do. The more things that are there, the more things can easily be done. In fact, I would propose that WildMenus has an option allowing users to 'promote' commonly used sub-menus to the main menu (e.g. by detaching them and dragging them to the top) if they are running on a particularly large monitor.
So, in my point of view, Apple did nothing wrong by putting Services under Info.
You are correct in this, but not for the reason you think. Services are in a sub-menu on OS X, because they are not important. Apple strongly de-emphasised services in favour of the more Macish (and less NeXTish) solution of AppleScripts and later Automator Workflows.
Even on OS X, services are still often useful. I regularly use on that takes a selected portion of text, typesets it using LaTeX and inserts the result to put equations into Keynote presentations, for example. This is not the kind of thing a 'normal' OS X user does, however, so the menu for doing it does not deserve to be at the top level. (By the way, the spell checking in text boxes in OS X is done via services, it's just not explicit)
On OS X, services are bad, because you lose the orthogonal property of the UI (you can accomplish the same thing in two different ways, so it is not obvious which you should use). On GNUstep, the services mechanism is much more important.
Depending on what people want/prefer, you could still implement it controlled by a default setting, that puts Services in the top level menu if not set (as this would be the default).
Much as I dislike the idea, it might be worth providing a more Macish interface for Mac switchers. I am in two minds as to whether to actually recommend this. On the one hand, a more familiar interface is easier for OS X users. On the other, encouraging them to use services more will show them advantages of the GNUstep environment more quickly. Switchers only stay switched if the new platform is better; if it's just familiar then they will eventually drift back (a problem, by the way, that GNOME and KDE have).
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