On 30 Jul 2007, at 00:49, Jon Gretar Borgthorsson wrote: > The idea I had was to have all the application in a list at the top > and clicking each give you the menu for that application. So > instead of the bar at the top reading like: > > RSS Reader Info Edit Feeds > > it would read: > > RSS Reader | Vindaloo | Typewriter | Calc > > That would give you quick access to menus and also serve as an > application switcher of some sort. Heck. It would even give you the > option of marking some software marked as favourites and give you > the menus of the software even when not running. Might not work in > reality and needs work but it just flyed through my head when I was > reading this mail.
It's an interesting idea. I can see a few problems, and I wonder if you have any ideas for addressing them: - The first problem I see is that it wouldn't scale very well. On my 15" laptop screen, I could support maybe a dozen or so applications before I run out of menu bar space (and we want to scale down to much smaller screens). I typically have 15-20 running. You could have some kind of spill, but then accessing the ones at the end would be very slow. - When you quit an application, all of the other menus to the right of it move, destroying motor memory. Presumably the applications with the longest lifecycle would gradually migrate to the left, but then you'd learn their positions while they were running and click on the wrong thing when you quit and relaunched them. - Every single menu operation becomes harder. The top of the screen is trivial to hit (Fitts' law, infinite target), but then the menu item is a bit harder. Then you add a sub-menu item. Calculating the rough angle of movement from menu to sub-menu gives a big score for Fitts' law. David _______________________________________________ Etoile-discuss mailing list [email protected] https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/etoile-discuss
