In Office 12, the new Galleries could probably have been modals as well, as similar features were in earlier versions.
I'm not as all crazy about 'Ribbons' as the rest. The take up a lot of screen real estate, and in many cases require significant processing resources (WYSIWYG font settings for instance). While they are certainly great for some things, I'm not all that stoked about them for all interface needs. And, they aren't as easy to figure out as one might think. I believe we've already argued the plus/minus of them in past threads.
But there's something very immediate-feeling about having a gallery pop up from the toolbar. And while a modal requires an explicit gesture to dismiss it, menus are dismissed by doing anything outside of it, allowing the busy user to move on to do something else if the mood strikes them, and the menu politely gets out of their way and lets them do it.
Of course there's always the issue of how to dismiss them (cancel them). If you click outside the window, but on a different button or ribbon, does it instantly popup? Or is the click captured only as a dismissal? And what about accidental clicking outside the window, or switching to another app? _______________________________________________ use-revolution mailing list [email protected] Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
