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From: phd@speech1.cs.cmu.edu (Paul Dietz)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: defaults in hierarchical menus
Keywords: hierarchical menus
Message-ID: <2267@pt.cs.cmu.edu>
Date: 14 Jul 88 10:22:54 GMT
References: <5969@spool.cs.wisc.edu> <391@umn-d-ub.D.UMN.EDU>
Sender: netnews@pt.cs.cmu.edu
Organization: Carnegie-Mellon University, CS/RI
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In article <391@umn-d-ub.D.UMN.EDU> gandreas@ub.d.umn.edu.UUCP (Glenn Andreas) writes:
>In article <5969@spool.cs.wisc.edu> engber@speedy.cs.wisc.edu (Mike Engber) writes:
>>Now that hierarchical menus are becoming widely used, I find that I'm having
>>to move the mouse excessively to make menu selections. 
>Agreed
Triple that!
>>What I would like to see is a default selection. One possibility is to
>>have the first item in a sub-menu selected if you release the mouse in its
>>parent menu item. Since this may not be appropriate for all h-menus, it should
>>be optional. H-menus that have defaults could indicate this by highlight the
>>default item along with the parent.

An obvious way to eliminate some of the concerns is to show all the
defaults when you pull down the top level menu. Since there is only one
default max per menu item, these would fit alongside the original menu.
Then you could just select the top level item, and get the default
without having to wqit for the heirarchy to pop-up. Of course,
when it does pop-up, the default should somehow be indicated.

Just another random opinion...

Paul H. Dietz                                        ____          ____
Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering        / oo \        <_<\\\
Carnegie Mellon University                        /|  \/  |\        \\ \\
--------------------------------------------     | | (  ) | |       | ||\\
"If God had meant for penguins to fly,             -->--<--        / / |\\\  /
he would have given them wings."            _________^__^_________/ / / \\\\-