On 04/16/2011 10:16 PM, Dylan McCall wrote:
So, this is all about making menus a little more succinct and easy to navigate. I think it's curiously parallel to what toolbars should be (and mostly are).
Long term, the issue at hand is making all the commands and options of programs accessibly. Especially those that can't be mapped to something on the canvas/working-area directly.
To have a chance of doing better in he future, being able to try various approaches and iterate quickly, an abstraction should be introduced and advocated to application and environment programmers.
Instead of specifying menus directly, there should be sets of commands. Maybe with tagging / overlapping grouping. This format should be rich enough to allow building either traditional menus and toolbars, ribbons, marking menus or command-line interfaces.
Unfortunately, lots of toolbars in GNOME are filled with New / Open / Save / Save As / Select All / Cut / Copy / Paste / Help, leaving no space for that stuff which is actually useful and you don't know to look for in the menu. (Besides, if you look at a toolbar and see all those redundant things, what is the chance you'll keep looking to find the one or two useful things?)
The problem here is that a group of users do consider having those basic file and clipboard actions on toolbars very useful. Some people just don't use keyboard shortcuts (I still remember the look on some fellow student faces, eyebrows raised to the max, on observing my use of shortcuts and quickly OK-ing dialogs with Enter ...).
Oh, and don't forget touch-screen interfaces. -- Thorsten Wilms thorwil's design for free software: http://thorwil.wordpress.com/