On Tue, 28 Dec 2004 11:24:04 +0100, "stéphane ducasse" ducasse@iam.unibe.ch said:
([ENH] add screen capture in TheWorldMenu)
Stef
This is good functionality to have somewhere in the menu system.
However, I'm not sure we should be adding anything to the toplevel World menu at this point. The World menu is already pretty full of stuff (25 items), and you can't even see it all on a PDA. I think we may have to have a moratorium on adding anything new to the World menu, unless something else is removed or consolidated. The screen capture items should go in a submenu (the question is which submenu).
This topic comes up periodically: "We really need to clean up/reduce the size of the World menu and clean up its submenus too". But this is not really that easy to do, almost any change you make will potentially aggravate a lot of people... but perhaps we should try anyway. :) We can wait for a usability expert to volunteer to take this on, but we'll probably be waiting a long time, and realistically it needs to be someone who is pretty familiar with Squeak.
IMO there are only a few items in the World menu that are really obvious candidates for removal/consolidation:
"Print PS to File" - This one should go to a submenu. It's useful but it is not toplevel-menu-status. Of course, it should go wherever Stef's screen capture menu items go, since it's almost the same thing. :) Is there an obvious submenu for this sort of stuff? "help"? "appearance"? Create a new "display" submenu?
"objects" and "new morph..." - These both perform essentially the same function and should be consolidated somehow into a single menu item. Er, ah, how to do this. The objects tool already has most of the functionality of the "new morph" menu, perhaps the few leftovers from the "new morph" menu (not already implemented by the objects tool) can be added as an extra menu button in the objects tool window. Or, include only the "objects" menu and have a preference to replace it with the "new morph" submenu, since most people probably just use one or the other. (Although I'm reluctant to add a preference for every little UI menu difference, such as this.)
"save as new version" - There are five save/quit related menu items which seems like a bit much. "save as new version" is kind of useful, but "save as..." is really almost as fast. Or perhaps a single "New Version" button could be added to the Save As dialog to achieve (almost) the same effect.
"playfield options" - This are EToy specific. It would be nice if the "playfield options" menu only showed up if you already had a scripting area open. (I haven't used these much, I assume "playfield" refers to a "scripting area"?) Also, I suppose both the "authoring tools" and "playfield options" menus would disappear if we were ever able to unload EToys, so perhaps this isn't a big problem.
OK, those are the "easy" ones, but there are still a few more which may be more problematic but are still worth pondering:
"jump to project"/"save project on file..."/"load project from file..." - Personally I wouldn't mind getting rid of all of these, since they're covered in the "projects..." submenu. Projects are important, but IMO no more important than regular windows (SystemWindows), and "find window" et al are handled in a submenu. "previous project" probably deserves to stay in the World menu, though, since it is a pretty fundamental navigation aid.
"flaps" - Eh, this submenu is pretty small and perhaps most of the items could be consolidated into the "appearance" menu.
"changes" - Hmmmm, *maybe* this could be consolidated into the "debug" and/or "open" menus, although perhaps it should stay as it is.
All of the rest of them seem reasonbly essential to me. Certainly some of the submenus themselves need some refactoring as well.
Perhaps a certain subset of functionality could be moved to the smaller yellow-click/"personal"/"world" menu, to preserve the same quick access. Such as the project navigation, or perhaps the EToy stuff.
- Doug