On Tue, May 18, 2010 at 05:15, Luke Morton
<luke.morton@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"Cleaned up and optimised"; sounds like a good idea. How would you do
General comments:
(Pertaining to the removal of menus and replacement with toolbar menus
as mentioned in your blog post.)
1. Menus provide access to functions that might be otherwise obscured,
infrequently used or hard to access--especially for people who cannot
use pointing devices.
For example, I can tell that if I want to insert something into this
email I can press Alt+I to get the insert menu, even though I've never
used it before. If that menu were represented by an icon in a toolbar,
how would I get to it without having to tab through the entire
interface?
mousekeys?
Hah, no, indeed, it's an accessibility thing. You don't want to live your life on TAB.
For mouseless situations, this is a secure fallback that every app designer can choose to include.
2. Menus provide a convenient reference list of keyboard accelerators.
If that menu were represented by an icon in a toolbar, how would I get
to it without having to tab through the entire interface?
Take gcalctool for example. If it didn't have a menu, and you couldn't
use your mouse, how would you switch to a different mode? Quit the
application? Input an ASCII character?
3. A menu by itself takes up less space than a toolbar by itself
Removing the menu in gcalctool in the same way that Nautilus-Elementary
removes the menu would mean that we'd have to add a toolbar for the
functions that have no-where else to go. (I don't think this is
particularly important though.)
None of these are absolute barriers to your idea, but they are things
that need to be considered/resolved.
Before we remove anything that works perfectly already, so i agree with Luke, we should consider wrapping something forgiving around it. There are always ways, and i know Tyler takes taking things seriously religiously seriously :D