On 30 Sep 2006 at 14:34, Darcy James Argue wrote:

> So yes, on Mac, the Program Options menu is found in the standard 
> place for all Preferences in OS X. On Windows, it's in the Edit menu 
> (which seems logical enough to me, but I'm not a Windows user).

It's not a Windows standard. "Preferences" is not the standard 
Windows terminology. Compare Mozilla to Firefox: on Mozilla, it's 
EDIT | PREFERENCES. On Firefox it's TOOLS | OPTIONS. I always assumed 
the EDIT | PREFERENCES came from Mac, but it may be a UNIX thing 
instead.

I don't know where it should be because I don't know the new menu 
structure. It should be in the OS-standard location only if it makes 
sense for the application involved. For a single menu choice, I can't 
see program options belonging under EDIT on Windows. But I don't know 
where they belong.

But the old situation was just fine because the Options and Tools 
menus were quite substantial in themselves and deserved to be at the 
top-level of the hierarchy. 

Once Options has been collapsed into a single Program Options dialog 
(or submenu choice), then it becomes sticky. On Windows, OPTIONS 
usually goes under TOOLS, but the Finale TOOLS menu means something 
completely different than the standard one in Windows, so it doesn't 
quite belong there. 

On the other hand, I've never seen a Windows program that doesn't use 
the term PREFERENCES for program options that put it on the EDIT 
menu.

It's hard to figure out what's best for these kinds of choices, 
especially when one OS has a top-level PREFERENCES menu. Is that a 
standard Mac UI convention? I haven't used Mac enough to know.

-- 
David W. Fenton                    http://dfenton.com
David Fenton Associates       http://dfenton.com/DFA/

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