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From: chuqui@nsc.UUCP (Chuq Von Rospach)
Newsgroups: net.micro.mac
Subject: menubar items without menus? (suggested enhancement...)
Message-ID: <3281@nsc.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 17-Sep-85 23:19:03 EDT
Article-I.D.: nsc.3281
Posted: Tue Sep 17 23:19:03 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 19-Sep-85 05:33:25 EDT
Distribution: net
Organization: Uncle Chuqui's Lemming Farm
Lines: 36

I've been a couple of design issues through my head the last few days, and
I've come up with what I think might be a reasonable extension to the
standard mac user interface. I wanted to drop it onto the net and see what
people thought about it before I started building a design with it in mind,
though, in case there is a problem I haven't thought of.

There seem to be certain cases where it would be nice to be able to get to
a command, usually something that would be a repetetive operation, quickly.
Things like next/previous page in MacWrite or next/previous record in a
database lookup. You could use scrollbars if the window and the record size
are the same, but in many cases the visible window (and the scroll region)
have nothing to do with the logical records. 

You could do this by setting up a standard menu item such as 'movement'
with two items 'forward' and 'backward', but a menu operation requires
you to {point,click,drag,position,unclick} to cause the operation to
happen. In a highly repetitive situation that turns into a lot of small but
highly details hand movements, and gets tiring.

I'd like to extend the user interface to allow a menu item (say 'forward'
or 'backward') to exist without a menu attached. If someone clicks that
menu item, a special menu code is returned and the operation is acted upon.
This way, you could simply point at 'forward' and then {click,unclick}
through any number of records quickly, something I haven't seen done well
yet on the Mac (pointers are welcome, folks...)

Any comments on this? I think it looks good, but I'm not close to taking a
religious position on it. If you've got ideas (pro or con), drop me a line
and I'll summarize to the network.

chuq

-- 
Chuq Von Rospach nsc!chuqui@decwrl.ARPA {decwrl,hplabs,ihnp4}!nsc!chuqui

Take time to stop and count the ewoks...