Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!spool.mu.edu!agate!pasteur!cory.Berkeley.EDU!navas From: navas@cory.Berkeley.EDU (David C. Navas) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy Subject: Re: De-macification of the Amiga (Re: The Amiga's Future) Message-ID: <14300@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU> Date: 26 Jun 91 21:32:51 GMT References: <5338@dirac.physics.purdue.edu> <1991Jun23.150149.16969@Sugar.NeoSoft.com> <5342@dirac.physics.purdue.edu> <1991Jun24.094738.29131@Sugar.NeoSoft.com> Sender: news@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU Reply-To: navas@cory.Berkeley.EDU Lines: 69 In article lron@easy.lrcd.com (Dwight Hubbard) writes: >Good explanation, but you happen to have any Idea why the damn menus are in >screen title bar instead of the title bar for the window were they belong?? Well, this is a safer topic than any other I seem to have picked up, so I'll offer a partial answer. :) Let's decide that we are going to put all menus in the window title, where they ostensibly belong. In fact, under the Amiga more so than on the Mac this is true. On the Mac you have a very standard menu set shared by all programs, so the menus are a bit more global. This is not true of the Amiga. At anyrate, let's discover what tradeoffs and problems we could run into. The first thing we might have to decide is whether to restrict the menu rendering to a particular window, or whether the menu should be drawn straight to the screen as is done currently. Benefits: (for clipping to window) Only that window will have it's graphic rendering halted, no other window would be affected, and other programs wouldn't appear to "freeze" It's more consistent with the idea that the menu belongs to the window. Problems: The window may not be large enough to display the menu. I personally would say that the Problem was larger than the Benefits, and so opt for screen-drawn menus. However, the list of problems doesn't stop there. What if the window title is not large enough to fit all the menu header items? Do we use the Motif/Windows trick of expanding the title area vertically? What if that is still not enough room? What happens to menus which, when rendered at the top of the screen, would have had enough room to fit themselves vertically, but don't when the window is at the very bottom of the screen? The list kinda goes on in the same vein from there. None of these are unsolvable, the question becomes "which is the best solution?" Which is the one that the human-computer interface folks will thrill over? The second half of the problem is that menu layout, gadget layout, etc. are processes which belong in the user interface's context, not in the application context. Unfortunately, not even gadtools provides this flexibility. Alas. The short answer to your question is that Cmdre does not spend enough money to either keep its employees (ie. commensurate compensation), or to hire enough employees to address these and other areas. Peter Cherna impresses me a great deal [something I don't say often], but he is only a single programmer.... >-Dwight Hubbard INTERNET: lron@easy.lrcd.com - >-Kaneohe, Hawaii USENET : ...!uunet!easy!lron - ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Lucky guy. PS. By the by, I'd be willing to discuss this more vigorously via e-mail. I tried to keep it short, and left out a lot of examples, etc. Please mail me this posting, and I'll elaborate to whatever extent you'd like. :) David Navas navas@cory.berkeley.edu 2.0 :: "You can't have your cake and eat it too." Also try c186br@holden, c260-ay@ara and c184-ap@torus