Dan has a point. Who uses menus nowadays – if there's an effective toolbar?
On the Mac, the menubar has become nothing but a clothes-horse to hang hotkeys on. On Windows, there needn't be any rational link between the hotkeys and the menubar at all. (There needn't be any rational link between any parts of the UI – and often isn't.) But: "abusus non tollit usum". The prevalence of abuse isn't an argument against proper use. The menubar was good in its time (1980s) and was a great improvement on what went before – teletype interfaces. Just the sort of interface we still expect the J user to use in the guise of the Term window. Which says something for our belief in modern GUIs. But a menubar only works (a) for the novice user, as a roadmap of the app[lication], (b) to the extent it looks like the menubar of every other app. But that's been too restrictive for the "creativity" of 3rd party product developers. Pressing for a good design of menubar has been a lost cause for years. As an industry we're in the position of having to provide one, to look like a "proper" program, but nobody believes in its effectiveness because nobody's aware of a good example. (For really bad examples see Word and Excel.) It's like the Table of Contents of a textbook. There's got to be one. But nobody uses it in day-to-day consultation of the book: if there's a good index they use that. You only use the TOC on first buying the book, to get a broad idea of coverage. I put it to the forum: JQt as it stands has neither a good "Table of Contents" (menubar) nor a good "Index" (Help subsystem). But have we got such a torrent of genuine "novice users" that it's worth anyone's time developing either? Or can we handle them all by one-to-one volunteer tutorials on the 3 (4) forums? It's no mystery why modern palmtop platforms have dispensed with the menubar, in favor of a launchpad of app icons. (And – as an aside – in the context of iOS, an "app" is whatever you can buy from the App Store.) But one has to ask: which is the cause and which is the effect? On Tue, Sep 15, 2015 at 7:59 PM, Dan Bron <[email protected]> wrote: > Ian wrote: >> A properly designed menu system is a huge help for a novice user. > > Tangentially related: I ignore menus as often as I can. On websites, for > example, I universally opt to use the search feature. And if the search > feature is absent, or sucks, I use a site-specific search in Google. In > applications, similarly I try to learn the pertinent keyboard shortcuts, > maybe do some customizations in the preferences dialog, and thereafter ignore > the menus. > > In short, I have no interest in learning someone else’s ontology. It’s like > going to a pharmacy in a foreign country: sure, it makes sense to whoever > laid it out, but I still can’t find anything. Easier and more effective to > just ask someone to point you in the right direction. > > -Dan > > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
