Re: NSMenu* and NSPopuUp* issues

[Philippe C . D . Robert]

On Thursday, March 27, 2003, at 02:10  Uhr, Chris Hanson wrote:
> At 10:26 AM -0500 3/24/03, Jim Balhoff wrote:
> > Which is why the NeXT-style vertical menu is so nice - the whole menu 
> > is available where your mouse is right now, with a right-click. A 
> > novice user can still see the options available in the menu floating 
> > in the upper left corner, if they need.
>
> Tog demonstrated in the mid-late 1980s that this type of system is 
> actually slower than a menu bar bound to a screen edge.

I remember an old study proofing that keyboard based interfaces are 
faster to use than mouse based systems. This is true as far as I can 
tell (working mostly w/ X11 terminals and vi), but does it mean UI 
based interfaces are bad because they are slower? Definitely not :-)

> You can't just assume that because the mouse has to travel further 
> that an operation takes longer.  It may actually take less time 
> because the user doesn't need to engage their fine motor skills for 
> the entire duration of the task, only at the very end.

Do you also dislike context sensitive popup menus then?

> (This is why in-window menu bars like that in Microsoft Windows are 
> terrible from a usability standpoint; they mimic the form of the 
> infinitely-tall Macintosh menu bar but you actually have to use fine 
> motor skills to both acquire and manipulate the control.  Doh!)

I'd say that since most Windows users tend to use their apps maximised 
to fullscreen, there is no radical difference to the Mac menu bar - the 
difference here though is that on Windows context sensitive menus are 
much more common and much more used.

But to remain on-topic, the question was whether to keep support for 
horizontal menus in gnustep-gui or not. I also think it is important to 
keep this support if we ever want to integrate GNUstep into native GUIs 
just like OPENSTEP Enterprise did it - nobody would want to use an 
application which does not integrate seamlessly into the system's UI 
(just like using old Mac OS 9 apps on Mac OS X is horrible due to the 
different UI).

-Phil
--
Philippe C.D. Robert
http://www.nice.ch/~phip