Hi Chris,
I do not disagree with most of what you say, nevertheless, let me
comment on two things. If this will sound somewhat rude, I
apologize in advance (actually, I wrote this sentence later... ;-)
but I had a crappy day with on-call-duty :-p
No worries.
Frankly, I do not (as probably most people) care whether studies
show that doing it this way is better than doing it that way. If
neither way provides the best usability for ME, they both are 'wrong.'
Interestingly, I have read a couple of user studies that show that
users tend to pick sub-optimal user configurations if left to their
own devices. It turns out that what seems best at first glance to
the average user tends to be a bad choice in the long run. This,
incidentally, is why developers are often very bad at designing good
UIs.
Hitting a menu at the top of the screen is very easy to do. The
more things
that are there, the more things can easily be done.
To take this thought further, the next logical step would be to
move every sub-menu, like GNUMail's "Make Filter from" and "Get New
Mail" to the top. Because they would be easily accessible. OTOH,
the menu would be pretty much unusable because there's too much
there already -- GNUMail already has nine menus -- but not everyone
has a 1600x1200 desktop...
Which is why I specified, space permitting.
And _IMHO_ this is where Apple got it right. If there is no real
menu entry, it doesn't belong at top level. And (again _IMHO_) this
would include the Services and Scripting menus.
And on OS X I agree. Services is in a submenu where it belongs.
There are other things I would promote to the menu bar on OS X before
the services menu.
On GNUstep, the services mechanism is much more important.
The problem, however, is that there aren't that many applications
that make use of it.
One of the aims of Étoilé is to change that.
Chris,
David
donning his asbestos suite...
Curses, mine is in for repairs.
_______________________________________________
Etoile-dev mailing list
[email protected]
https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/etoile-dev
