I've dropped programming forum and moved to chat forum. For people not subscribed to chat, here's the current (or transitional) chat forum responses in this thread:
Marc Simpson: http://jsoftware.com/pipermail/chat/2015-September/006739.html Me: http://jsoftware.com/pipermail/chat/2015-September/006740.html Thanks, -- Raul On Wed, Sep 16, 2015 at 7:30 AM, Ian Clark <[email protected]> wrote: > Dan has a point. Who uses menus nowadays – if there's an effective toolbar? > > On the Mac, the menubar has become nothing but a clothes-horse to hang > hotkeys on. On Windows, there needn't be any rational link between the > hotkeys and the menubar at all. (There needn't be any rational link > between any parts of the UI – and often isn't.) > > But: "abusus non tollit usum". The prevalence of abuse isn't an > argument against proper use. > > The menubar was good in its time (1980s) and was a great improvement > on what went before – teletype interfaces. Just the sort of interface > we still expect the J user to use in the guise of the Term window. > Which says something for our belief in modern GUIs. > > But a menubar only works (a) for the novice user, as a roadmap of the > app[lication], (b) to the extent it looks like the menubar of every > other app. But that's been too restrictive for the "creativity" of 3rd > party product developers. > > Pressing for a good design of menubar has been a lost cause for years. > As an industry we're in the position of having to provide one, to look > like a "proper" program, but nobody believes in its effectiveness > because nobody's aware of a good example. (For really bad examples see > Word and Excel.) > > It's like the Table of Contents of a textbook. There's got to be one. > But nobody uses it in day-to-day consultation of the book: if there's > a good index they use that. You only use the TOC on first buying the > book, to get a broad idea of coverage. > > I put it to the forum: JQt as it stands has neither a good "Table of > Contents" (menubar) nor a good "Index" (Help subsystem). But have we > got such a torrent of genuine "novice users" that it's worth anyone's > time developing either? Or can we handle them all by one-to-one > volunteer tutorials on the 3 (4) forums? > > It's no mystery why modern palmtop platforms have dispensed with the > menubar, in favor of a launchpad of app icons. (And – as an aside – in > the context of iOS, an "app" is whatever you can buy from the App > Store.) > > But one has to ask: which is the cause and which is the effect? > > On Tue, Sep 15, 2015 at 7:59 PM, Dan Bron <[email protected]> wrote: >> Ian wrote: >>> A properly designed menu system is a huge help for a novice user. >> >> Tangentially related: I ignore menus as often as I can. On websites, for >> example, I universally opt to use the search feature. And if the search >> feature is absent, or sucks, I use a site-specific search in Google. In >> applications, similarly I try to learn the pertinent keyboard shortcuts, >> maybe do some customizations in the preferences dialog, and thereafter >> ignore the menus. >> >> In short, I have no interest in learning someone else’s ontology. It’s like >> going to a pharmacy in a foreign country: sure, it makes sense to whoever >> laid it out, but I still can’t find anything. Easier and more effective to >> just ask someone to point you in the right direction. >> >> -Dan >> >> >> ---------------------------------------------------------------------- >> For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
