ken@hotlips.att.COM (Ken MacLeod) (07/20/90)
In article <9240@goofy.Apple.COM>, lsr@Apple.COM (Larry Rosenstein) writes: > In article <BARNETT.90Jul18130957@grymoire.crd.ge.com> barnett@crdgw1.ge.com writes: > > > >But when you have bigger screens, or perhaps three monitors, move the > >mouse to one spot is a real pain, expecially when you are at one end, > >and the menu bar is at the other. > > > >I have never had to "hunt" for a mouse with a pop-up menu. > > Except that in the latest CHI Proceedings some people did a study that > showed that the menu bar at the top of the screen was faster than using a > popup menu. The reason being that the top of the screen acts as a barrier, > which increases the effective size of the target. (That doesn't mean one > couldn't design a popup menu interface tha twas better, but a simple popup ^^??^^ > menu won't do it.) How 'bout: Gravity wells. Once the pointer is inside a pop-up menu it "bumps" into the edge, requiring a little more "pull" (about 10-15 pixels of movement) to move the cursor out of the "depression" caused by the popup. While this goes against the "don't move [stop, in this case] the pointer" I have the feeling that it would feel right. Actually, visually, the wall could be a gray scale, and the pointer would move 1/3 or 1/4 speed over the "anomaly". [At last! a practical UI use of visual depth!] "Walls" would also occur on the outside edges of tool palettes in active windows. (For X people using auto-focus and auto-raise windows, auto-raise windows would be "higher" than the surrounding windows [and there was much rejoicing :-) ].) -- Ken ken@snowhit.att.com
RSBONDI@pucc.Princeton.EDU (Richard S. Bondi) (07/20/90)
In article <529@hotlips.att.COM>, ken@hotlips.att.COM (Ken MacLeod) writes: >In article <9240@goofy.Apple.COM>, lsr@Apple.COM (Larry Rosenstein) writes: >> In article <BARNETT.90Jul18130957@grymoire.crd.ge.com> barnett@crdgw1.ge.com writes: >> > WordPerfect Mac seems to me to have solved the problems behind all complaints about pop-up menus. If you select just the item that has a popup menu, and release the mouse button, the original menu disappears and in its place, the popup is shown pulled down, making it extremely easy for the user to "hit the target" of the menu item s/he wishes to select. I'd be interested in any strong objections to this solution of popup menu items being difficult to select.