vishniac@wanginst.UUCP (Ephraim Vishniac) (09/30/85)
Chuq: I tried to send this to you directly, but it was returned as undeliverable after a week's delay. -------------------real message starts here----------------------- References: <3281@nsc.UUCP> My immediate response to your idea (active menubar items) is that it's sufficiently confusing to novices that one ought to look around for alternatives. One alternative does come to mind: In many programs that I like the design of (not necessarily Mac programs), shift-whatever means "do some obvious extension of whatever." For example, to scroll by screenfuls, you click in the grey region of the scrollbar. To scroll by pages, I suggest you should shift-click in the grey region of the scrollbar. To go to an extremity of your document, you should option-click (shift-option-click?) in the grey region of the scroll bar. I like this kind of design for several reasons. First, and extremely important, is that it does not clutter the screen. Instead, it extends the power of existing controls in a logical way. Second, it's very easy to standardize, and nothing surprising will happen if you try to use it in applications that don't support it. In fact, nothing very surprising will happen if you do it by accident. Third, it's not a *change* to the existing user interface, but a (consistent, I hope) extension of it. I'll be very interested to hear the results of your survey. I hope to see a response that exhibits the innate sensitivity of Mac users to clean, elegant design. I fear a plague of kluges. I'll leave it to our mutual audience to decide which category I've contributed to. Ephraim Vishniac [apollo, bbncca, cadmus, decvax, harvard, linus, masscomp]!wanginst!vishniac vishniac%Wang-Inst@Csnet-Relay -- Ephraim Vishniac [apollo, bbncca, cadmus, decvax, harvard, linus, masscomp]!wanginst!vishniac vishniac%Wang-Inst@Csnet-Relay
gus@Shasta.ARPA (10/03/85)
> In many programs that I like the design of (not necessarily Mac programs), > shift-whatever means "do some obvious extension of whatever." For example, > to scroll by screenfuls, you click in the grey region of the scrollbar. > To scroll by pages, I suggest you should shift-click in the grey region of > the scrollbar. To go to an extremity of your document, you should > option-click (shift-option-click?) in the grey region of the scroll bar. Shif, Option, etc. click can bee used far too much on a Mac. It is just too esasy to put a shift key conditional in the code to substitute for a more visual interface. One interimn solution is to change the shape of the cursor when you hold down shift where it makes a difference. I have not seen much discussion about changing cursors on the net. I, for one, did this to an extreme in the MacView 3D graphics package. (Does anyone have it yet? it is finally out!) My general attitude was to change the cursor whenever you move the mouse over an area that does something different. I even have a "no mouse" shape which appears over a "dead" area where clicks are ignored. This sort of code is fairly easy to write, as soon as you have all the bitmaps created. Gus Fernandez
davidl@teklds.UUCP (David Levine) (10/03/85)
Apparently I'm not the only one who can't get through to Chuqui. Here's my
$0.02 on the issue:
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Sorry, Chuqui. It just won't fly with me.
The problem is that it violates two of the major principles of the Macintosh
Interface: Consistency (predictability) and Safety (undo-ability). Your
typical Mac user can sit down at a random program s/he's never seen before and
prowl through the menus to see what functions are available, because s/he KNOWS
that when you click on a menu item a menu appears, and you can just drag the
mouse off the menu if you want to avoid doing anything. Every user knows this
intimately after only a few hours' Mac-ing.
With the introduction of menubar items without menus, one can no longer be
sure that clicking on a menubar item won't do anything. (Even something so
simple and harmless as a little cursor motion can be disquieting if you aren't
expecting it.) If you click on one of the menubar items and no menu appears,
it's not intuitive what to do to prevent the action (whatever it is... you
might not even know) from occuring. It might even be too late!
I think that this feature would even mess up experienced users. In
applications with many menus (especially MacDraw) I'm always pulling down the
wrong menu, but it doesn't affect me much. If one of the wrong menus would
pull what I'm working on away from the usable area, it would be intensely
frustrating. Also, having menubar items without menus would certainly increase
the number of menubar items, increasing the apparent complexity of the
application and making it more likely you won't remember which menu does what.
I suggest that the functionality you seek might be better accomplished through
some permanent buttons at the top of the application's window. See 1st Base
and Ensemble for examples.
David D. Levine (...decvax!tektronix!teklds!davidl) [UUCP]
(teklds!davidl.tektronix@csnet-relay.csnet) [ARPA]
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My comment on Ephriam's suggestion (Shift-click and Option-click in the grey
area of the menubar): it's better than menubar items without menus, but the
problem is that unless you read the documentation you don't know it's there.
Many people never read the documentation even on "ordinary" computers... on the
Mac I bet the *majority* don't read it.
(For the same reason, I object to command keys that have no menu equivalents.
Microsoft is fond of these; in Microsoft File, the keys Tab, Enter, Return,
and their Shift, Command, Option, and combined variants all have *separate
meanings*. I can never remember whether it's Shift-Option-Tab or
Option-Command-Enter to back up to the same field in the previous record...
But that's another issue.)
- davidlusenet@ucbvax.ARPA (USENET News Administration) (10/04/85)
Why not just do it the way it's done in Crunch? Have a prepared "icon dialog" with all the various symbols, and then have it appear on the screen with a menu selection (from a normal menu bar). It could automatically appear, with it's own go away box (in which case it would be an icon window, I guess:-) ------- **temporary manual .signature*** korn%ucbcory@Berkeley.ARPA From the cranium caldrums nestled high atop the Bezerkeley Hills.