Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 (Tek) 9/28/84 based on 9/17/84; site teklds.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!mhuxr!mhuxt!houxm!vax135!cornell!uw-beaver!tektronix!teklds!davidl 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