Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!samsung!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!mips!apple!apple.com!rmh From: rmh@apple.com (Rick Holzgrafe) Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.system Subject: Re: System 7 talk: Hierarchial Apple Menus Message-ID: <8710@goofy.Apple.COM> Date: 15 Jun 90 21:03:02 GMT Sender: usenet@Apple.COM Organization: Apple Computer, Inc. Lines: 93 References:<68207@cc.utah.edu> <8655@goofy.Apple.COM> <372@three.MV.COM> In article <372@three.MV.COM> cory@three.MV.COM (Cory Kempf) writes: > A typical control pannel contains about 10-15 items. The typical user (at > least the ones that I have seen) have about 10 DAs that they can't live > without. Now, the normal Mac users uses about 5-10 applications regularly. > (word processor, drawing/painting program or two, page layout application, > spreadsheet, 2-5 games, Hypercard, and an application specific program (comm > program, a database, a scanner package, a flowcharting program, etc)). The > user, upon learning that they can put an alias of these programs into the > Apple menu, will most likely proceed to do so for most of his or her working > set. By my count, we have a conservative 25 entries... Power users will, of > course, have more, as will graphic arts people, engineers, and people with > multiple work contexts. Boy, not me. I agree with Larry: a menu with that many items in it is going to be too cluttered to use, no matter how it's organized. The stuff that'll go into my Apple menu *won't* be everything I use often. (Yes, I have dozens of things I use every day, too.) It'll only be those items which I use often and which either have no double-clickable documents or which I use often to create documents in empty folders. Whew - that last sentence is nearly unreadable. What I mean is this: ResEdit goes in my Apple menu because I use it frequently from folders where there is no double-clickable ResEdit document. But MacPaint doesn't go in my Apple folder, because most of the time I use MacPaint on existing documents in a project folder that I already have open. I only need to double-click the document to launch MacPaint. In fact, some things will *disappear* from my Apple menu. I have DAs and CDEVs I can't live without, but which I don't use often. Now I can dump them in some well-placed folder where I can find them easily but where I won't trip over them every time I pull down my Apple menu. To run them, I just open their folder and double-click. About this business of "explaining things to the novice"... bear with me and let me tell you a longish story with a moral. I've had the dubious pleasure of teaching vi (the Unix text editor) to people who haven't used it before. Almost to a person, they viewed it with a sense of panic: it was *so* feature-laden that it terrified them. Every key-click did *something*, and they lived in terror of hitting the wrong key and trashing something important and not being able to recover. (This applied to secretaries and high-level software engineers alike!) Vi enthusiasts would explain that "you don't have to use anything you don't understand" but it did not calm anybody. They saw every unknown as a hazard that could "get them" if they didn't understand it... and they didn't want to take the time to learn about them all. Most of them vehemently wanted a simpler editor. (By "vehemently", I mean some people shouted and swore!) Well, I'm a good teacher (if I say so myself :-) and I did get all those folks calmed down, well-taught, and I left them all productively tapping away. The moral is not that vi is a bad editor (it's not) or that it's impossible or even difficult to learn (it isn't). The moral is that too many features scare the bejabbers out of newcomers, and create mental and emotional blocks to learning and using the system. This is frustrating to developers, who want to empower their users and often can't understand why the users are "fighting" them about it. But it is a fact of life: all the sweet reason in the world won't appease a user who thinks the manual is a bit thick and wants something simpler. The Mac was designed to be a "warm, fuzzy" computer. It has *got* to seem simple to novices: they, not the power users, are the bulk of the Mac's market. Of course the Mac must also be powerful, and a truly great user interface is one which is both simple and powerful. But you can't always avoid the trade-off between power and simplicity. Some extra disclaimers, in addition to my usual: I'm not involved in System 7.0 or in user interface design (any more than anyone else at Apple). I'm just contributing my two cents to this thread - and probably worth every penny, too. :-) And I don't mean to imply that everyone in the world is intimidated by apparent complexity. Many brave souls sail into every new learning experience with verve and delight. On this newsgroup I expect the proportion of such folks is high - but trust me, out there in the mundane world, it isn't. ========================================================================== Rick Holzgrafe | {sun,voder,nsc,mtxinu,dual}!apple!rmh Software Engineer | AppleLink HOLZGRAFE1 rmh@apple.com Apple Computer, Inc. | "All opinions expressed are mine, and do 20525 Mariani Ave. MS: 77-A | not necessarily represent those of my Cupertino, CA 95014 | employer, Apple Computer Inc."