[UI] Squeak's Menus

[Chris Muller]

My least favorite design choice about the menus is the instructional
balloon help,

   "Enter text to narrow selection down to matching items."

Does anyone know why displaying this balloon only AFTER you've typed a
character, and the menu has visually responded by

  1) graying out everything not matching
  2) highlighting the first entry that does match
  3) displaying the typed character at the bottom of the menu,
increasing its height

that the balloon is then displayed?

  1) The above three visual cues make the balloon completely unnecessary
  2) In fact, having it appear at the top distracts the users
attention from the bottom, where the search string is being typed
  3) it sometimes even covers parts of the screen containing useful information!

Wouldn't it make more sense to display the balloon BEFORE a character
is typed?  Even better, how about not at all?  It doesn't seem like
something that would be that important to a newbie, who will be so
busy absorbing other information, and they'll stumble on it very soon
anyway..



On 9/19/07, Matthew Fulmer <tapplek at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 19, 2007 at 12:42:47PM -0700, Matthew Fulmer wrote:
> > On Tue, Sep 18, 2007 at 11:43:19PM -0700, Todd Blanchard wrote:
> > > I suspect that the problem could be alleviated by only allowing menus
> > > to be picked up by the hand if the mouse is properly in the title item.
> >
> > Attached is a fix. I tried to email it as a PinesoftWidgets
> > .mcz, but it was too big. Here it is as a changeset that does
> > not depend on Pinesoft
>
> http://bugs.squeak.org/view.php?id=6687
>
> --
> Matthew Fulmer -- http://mtfulmer.wordpress.com/
> Help improve Squeak Documentation: http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/808
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