Rob Lally <smalltalk at roblally.plus.com> wrote:

> One of the things that stands out as being different in Squeak from 
> other environments is the avoidance of traditional 'drop-down 
> top-of-the-screen' menu bars.
Hardly 'traditional'. Mac uses top-of-screen, an idiom that stopped
working well as soon as multitasking came in and became ludicrous with
large screens. Window uses top-of-window menubars, which doesn't give
the advantages originally claimed for the Mac style and takes up screen
rea estate to little effect. RISC OS doesn't use menubars at all,
preferring a popup menu tree with context sensitivity and various unix
window managers do all sorts of things including mixing all
possibilities at once.

> Why has the community avoided them?
I'd like to think because context related popup menus are understood to
be better. After all, they _are_ the original and traditional manner.

>What are the problems associated with
> them?
See decent UI textbooks.

> Does anyone feel the the Squeak environment is diminished by their
> absence? What advantages are there to not having them?
It only matters if you are keen on 'platform compliance' rather than
'good UI'. And that depends on the market for your work - sometimes
platform compliance is utterly crucial, sometimes it simply doesn't
matter.


tim
--
Tim Rowledge, tim at sumeru.stanford.edu, http://sumeru.stanford.edu/tim
It is easier to change the specification to fit the program than vice versa.