unity-design team mailing list archive

[Frederik Nnaji <frederik.nnaji@xxxxxxxxx>]

Yes Luke, it's a religious one, i agree..

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
> that for the gcalctool menus? (They seem pretty good to me.)
>
> 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