On 7/30/07, David Chisnall <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > It's an interesting idea. I can see a few problems, and I wonder if > you have any ideas for addressing them:
Have not given much thought on this. And it might turn out to be a worse solution than the current one. But I firmly believe that the macos solution can be improved. but it was the right decision to go to it instead of the space killing NextStep menu. - The first problem I see is that it wouldn't scale very well. On my > 15" laptop screen, I could support maybe a dozen or so applications > before I run out of menu bar space (and we want to scale down to much > smaller screens). I typically have 15-20 running. You could have > some kind of spill, but then accessing the ones at the end would be > very slow. Well. I have one idea. Some arrows at the end would give you scrolling access to what is not seen. Might have some ctrl+drag behaviour as an alternative for the more experienced. The focused application would of course have the prominent position. Ether it's the first or the middle position. The ordering of menus around it are not based on uptime of the application but rather on when it last had focus. Basically working in a similar fashion as the alt+tab application switcher where a single tap gives you the last application used and then the next latest application. The location of these menus based on that information would then be ordered around the focus application menu. - When you quit an application, all of the other menus to the right > of it move, destroying motor memory. Presumably the applications > with the longest lifecycle would gradually migrate to the left, but > then you'd learn their positions while they were running and click on > the wrong thing when you quit and relaunched them. See above. :) - Every single menu operation becomes harder. The top of the screen > is trivial to hit (Fitts' law, infinite target), but then the menu > item is a bit harder. Then you add a sub-menu item. Calculating the > rough angle of movement from menu to sub-menu gives a big score for > Fitts' law. This is true for the focused application. Accessing other application would be simpler and quicker. For people that often work in multiple application at a time this could be revolutionary. -- Jón Grétar Borgþórsson
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