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From: davidl@teklds.UUCP (David Levine)
Newsgroups: net.micro.mac
Subject: Re: Chuqui's enhancement(?) to user interface
Message-ID: <1097@teklds.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 3-Oct-85 13:02:54 EDT
Article-I.D.: teklds.1097
Posted: Thu Oct  3 13:02:54 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 5-Oct-85 06:37:16 EDT
References: <1153@wanginst.UUCP>
Reply-To: davidl@teklds.UUCP (David Levine)
Distribution: net
Organization: Tektronix, Beaverton OR
Lines: 53
Summary: 

Apparently I'm not the only one who can't get through to Chuqui.  Here's my 
$0.02 on the issue:

----------------------------------------

Sorry, Chuqui.  It just won't fly with me.

The problem is that it violates two of the major principles of the Macintosh
Interface: Consistency (predictability) and Safety (undo-ability).  Your
typical Mac user can sit down at a random program s/he's never seen before and
prowl through the menus to see what functions are available, because s/he KNOWS
that when you click on a menu item a menu appears, and you can just drag the
mouse off the menu if you want to avoid doing anything.  Every user knows this
intimately after only a few hours' Mac-ing.

With the introduction of menubar items without menus, one can no longer be 
sure that clicking on a menubar item won't do anything.  (Even something so 
simple and harmless as a little cursor motion can be disquieting if you aren't
expecting it.)  If you click on one of the menubar items and no menu appears, 
it's not intuitive what to do to prevent the action (whatever it is... you 
might not even know) from occuring.  It might even be too late!

I think that this feature would even mess up experienced users.  In
applications with many menus (especially MacDraw) I'm always pulling down the
wrong menu, but it doesn't affect me much.  If one of the wrong menus would
pull what I'm working on away from the usable area, it would be intensely
frustrating.  Also, having menubar items without menus would certainly increase
the number of menubar items, increasing the apparent complexity of the
application and making it more likely you won't remember which menu does what.

I suggest that the functionality you seek might be better accomplished through
some permanent buttons at the top of the application's window.  See 1st Base 
and Ensemble for examples.  

David D. Levine  (...decvax!tektronix!teklds!davidl)          [UUCP]
                 (teklds!davidl.tektronix@csnet-relay.csnet)  [ARPA]

----------------------------------------

My comment on Ephriam's suggestion (Shift-click and Option-click in the grey
area of the menubar): it's better than menubar items without menus, but the
problem is that unless you read the documentation you don't know it's there.
Many people never read the documentation even on "ordinary" computers... on the
Mac I bet the *majority* don't read it.  

(For the same reason, I object to command keys that have no menu equivalents.  
Microsoft is fond of these; in Microsoft File, the keys Tab, Enter, Return, 
and their Shift, Command, Option, and combined variants all have *separate 
meanings*.  I can never remember whether it's Shift-Option-Tab or 
Option-Command-Enter to back up to the same field in the previous record...
But that's another issue.)

- davidl