steele@unc.cs.unc.edu (Oliver Steele) (01/27/88)
I've seen several different places to put tool palettes:
1) in a special window (MacPaint 1.5, FullPaint, SuperPaint)
2) on the document window (MacDraw)
3) in the menu bar (sort-of MacDraw, Design [if I remember])
4) tear-off menus ((3) and (1)) (HyperCard, MacPaint 2, and
probably everything else that's written/revised within the
next year).
The user interface guidelines -- or at least the ones in IM1-5alpha --
mention the first two of these (IM1), but aren't really very definitive
about the issue. Is there getting to be something of a consensus about
the question? What do people prefer? (Please mail me answers to that
one, unless you can contribute some user interface theory.) I'm
particularly interested in the case of applications which can deal with
more than one open document.
The application in question devotes a lot of screen space to each
document, most of which is probably necessary, and allows arbitrarily
spatially large documents (document space, not screen space), in case this
is a factor.
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Oliver Steele ...!{decvax,ihnp4}!mcnc!unc!steele
steele@cs.unc.edu
"(This was after stew, but so is everything.)"
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