On 4/16/2011 12:59 PM, Aaron Smith wrote:
"Can you give me more detail on the context of what you'd use a context menu for?" Mostly to keep the UI from getting cluttered with all the controls to handle all the different types of items it might contain. Let's say you have a listbox of items. You can set the most frequent options to buttons in the main UI with their own accelerator, but if there're a pretty substantial number of secondary options it'd be nice to delegate them to a context menu. Let's say a calendar application, where you have a listbox of appointments. These appointments are all slightly different and so don't all have the same functionality. For instance, one may be a personal event, another might be a recurring event, another might be an event you do not have priveleges to invite additional guests to. . Your basic add, remove, and time functionality could go in the main UI, but a right click menu would be a great place to put more specific secondary options taylored to that appointment like inviting friends, viewing/editing appointment notes and details, or setting and distributing reminders. There are of course other ways these features could be worked into the UI, but just in observing how other applications I use are set up I feel that this is a sound UI wrinkle that would give fast access to the secondary options without cluttering the main dialog, requiring the generation of a second dialog, or requiring the user remember a lot of accelerators. The standard menus don't exactly accomplish the same thing because they cannot be taylored to an individual item. Ideally I'd have a context menu that could contain different options if I right click a recurring appointment that I administrate as opposed to an automatically generated appointment for a sporting event that comes from a public database. But you have to put all the potential options for all the potential items in the main menus, which makes the UI just as cluttered albeit it in a different place.
You are right though, I'm definitely not going to go extensively hacking away at this. It's just how I conceptually laid out the UI design before I realized I couldn't do this, and there are acceptable alternatives. But if it's something you guys have thought about adding to your XML dialog markup, consider me supportive of the idea.
