Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ukma!david From: david@ms.uky.edu (David Herron -- One of the vertebrae) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: Re: replacing the desktop metaphor (Why any metaphor?) Keywords: desktop metaphor, graphical interfaces, computing environments Message-ID: <10792@s.ms.uky.edu> Date: 2 Jan 89 16:31:21 GMT References: <850@mtfmi.att.com> <673@cogsci.ucsd.EDU> <1489@umbc3.UMD.EDU> <5057@garfield.MUN.EDU> <3193@sugar.uu.net> <5059@garfield.MUN.EDU> Reply-To: david@ms.uky.edu (David Herron -- One of the vertebrae) Organization: U of Kentucky, Mathematical Sciences Lines: 56 In article <5059@garfield.MUN.EDU> john13@garfield.UUCP (John Russell) writes: >In article <3193@sugar.uu.net> Peter da Silva writes: >> >>You have it backwards. WB 1.4 should stop trying to look like the Mac and go >>to pop-up menus. > >I've never seen any "control gadgets" on the Mac desktop, just icons for >objects (and I had to squint hard enough to make those out! :-). > >I was thinking in terms of the menu structure itself providing roadblocks, >eg. a terse one-word identifier and no easy way to provide extended help. Yes I agree, and I have my own suggestions for how this could be re-done A problem I see is that when you've selected a pull-down menu option there just isn't much you can do in terms of interaction. You already have the mouse button pressed y'see. The basic change I propose is to make the menu be a full-fledged window with resize & kill gadgets in 'em. This window will have to know when the mouse pointer is inside it and scroll around in the menu as necessary. Perhaps there could be some program available in the system which handles menus that you describe in some file and passes back an indicator of what was selected. But I don't know what mechanism would be good for doing it, but of course it would be best if it looked to the programmer as if it was a call into a library. Anyway. Then you can change the interaction from .. click up in the menu bar and hold the click (you don't have many options at this point) .. to .. click up in the menu bar, wait for the menu to pop up, scroll around in the menu, when ready click on a menu choice. The advantage of this is that you don't reduce the number of options that the user has. You also can extend how menus work. The menu could possibly stick around for awhile, saving some time when you have lots of things to do out of the same menu. You could also implement help somehow. The suggestion that comes to mind is to have a number of gadgets around the edge of this window, the ones above plus help and "do-it" gadgets. You click once on a menu choice, then on either the help or do-it gadget. Help pops up a window describing the menu choice. "do-it" does the menu choice. A double-click on the gadget means "do-it". Unix PC users might recognize some of these suggestions. (How do I formally submit suggestions for features ??? I'm pretty sure the right people at CA will see this, but this isn't a formal submission ....) -- <-- David Herron; an MMDF guy <-- ska: David le casse\*' {rutgers,uunet}!ukma!david, david@UKMA.BITNET <-- Now I know how Zonker felt when he graduated ... <-- Stop! Wait! I didn't mean to!