unity-design team mailing list archive

[Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Matt Richardson wrote on 03/11/11 09:01:
> 
> It strikes me that the idea behind hiding the menus has been that 
> for people with touch devices these menus are not useful and future
> applications should avoid the use of menus where possible.


That is the idea, but it is a misunderstanding. Touch applications
avoid menus partly through gestures, which often aren't available on a
PC, and mostly though having many fewer features than they would on a
PC. (For example, iTunes, Pages, and Keynote on iOS all have fewer
features than the same apps on Mac OS X.)

> However, this requires developers to rewrite their programs with 
> touch friendly interfaces and does not, in the intervening time, 
> offer a solution.


True. Imagine if you were at Adobe, for example, porting Photoshop to
Ubuntu. Avoiding menus obviously wouldn't be an option: it has far too
many features for that, and the interface needs to be mostly
consistent across platforms anyway. But Ubuntu's native menus wouldn't
be nearly visible enough for all those features. Possibly the least
bad choice would be to use a non-native menu bar.

> As an all round solution I suggest replacing the context menu with 
> a gnome pie menu which would contain the context menu items in the 
> right half, and the top menus as items in the left half. For 
> example: Right clicking a blank space in Nautilus would bring up a 
> pie in which 'Create New Folder', 'Create New Document' etc
> through to 'Properties', would make up the right half of the pie
> and 'File', 'Edit', 'View' etc through to 'Help' would make up the
> left half of the pie.
> 
> ...


Pie menus wouldn't work there, because they'd have many text items.
<http://elementaryos.org/journal/argument-against-pie-menus>

Pie menus do work when their items are few or icon-only.
<http://patternry.com/p=radial-menu/>

- -- 
mpt
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.11 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/

iEYEARECAAYFAk6yp+EACgkQ6PUxNfU6ecrQmgCfRFYVbM/U9P3OtxfpKjKiZSws
sBUAmwbMUb/Bl2ZzJYybvnebz9KVQpKv
=pkoD
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----