Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!hoptoad!tim
From: tim@hoptoad.uucp (Tim Maroney)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: Hierarchical menus
Message-ID: <10059@hoptoad.uucp>
Date: 5 Feb 90 21:49:31 GMT
References: <14044@reed.UUCP> <1990Feb5.004034.6097@oracle.com> <28018@brunix.UUCP>
Reply-To: tim@hoptoad.UUCP (Tim Maroney)
Organization: Eclectic Software, San Francisco
Lines: 26

Does anyone feel there are some serious ergonomic problems with the
Mac's hierarchical menus?  You have to do an absolutely flawless
horizontal drag all the way over to the menu; any slight deviation from
the roughly 16-bit-wide path to the menu will change items.  However,
the screen layout suggests on an instinctive level that you should be
able to drag straight to the menu item item you want, diagonally; if
you do this, though, the submenu vanishes.  Particularly if the main
menu is wide, there is a lot more work than there should be in
selecting hierarchical menus, and a lot of opprtunities for error
through small accidental hand movements or instinctive attempts to get
directly to where one wants to go instead of straight across and then
straight down.

It would be better if the hierarchical menu poped up closer to the left
edge of the menu, say perhaps halfway across or even 40 pixels to the
right of the left edge.  There would be less narrow-path horizontal
movement that way (none if the mouse was already somewhat over to the
right.  But since this is all internal to MenuSelect, I haven't been
able to come up with a reasonable way to write an INIT to do this.
There's no trap to patch, except the entirety of MenuSelect, which
is both unsafe and a pain.
-- 
Tim Maroney, Mac Software Consultant, sun!hoptoad!tim, tim@toad.com

"Everything that gives us pleasure gives us pain to measure it by."
    -- The Residents, GOD IN THREE PERSONS