Zurgle Project Update

Jim Benson jb at speed.net
Wed Sep 26 16:14:41 UTC 2001


Jerome,

I haven't quite figured out how menu bars fit into Squeak. This is just some
demo code that I threw in at the last second just to demonstrate what they
look like.

I have tended to use them when writing a specific application. There are
certain situations where they are very useful. I'll give you an example.
Look at Ned's zip archive viewer using "ArchiveViewer open" . Quite a few
buttons with small fonts. Now everyone has seen on their native platforms
simple applications like this that use menu bars. In this case, menu bars
might provide a nice UI alternative because there are a limited number of
operations that can be performed, these operations are easily grouped, yet
there are more functions than can easily fit onto buttons in the window
without being visually busy.

Will that make the app easier to use? No, you need to make more selections
in order to execute functions. However it would probably *feel* easier to
use as a novice, and not be as intimidating. Most people find it easier to
choose one thing out of four twice rather than one thing out of eight once.

After all, that's what menu bars provide. They provide a wide variety of
selections in a relatively small amount of screen real estate, and they
organize those selections into different areas. In the case of a mini-app as
it were, menu bars might be a useful interface paradigm to introduce.

In the Squeak development environment, I don't think that menu bars are
quite as useful. The activites that the World menu provides aren't as easily
categorized. In part that is due to the complexity of development
environment, though this is complicated by the fact that the overall
relationships of the menus haven't been visited in a while. Still, I've
noticed that some folks find the presence of the menu bar soothing,
especially people who have only lived in interface environments with menu
bars. In the UI world they call these things "affordances", they clue the
user that there is an action that they can execute.

It's like most computer tools, they have their good points and their bad
points. In the appropriate situation, they can be very nice to have. As I'm
sure that you have surely seen, used inappropriately they can be very
annoying.

If one were to be more serious, they'd probably have a much broader, user
definable selection of Squeak development menus available for a project
based menu bar.

It's an interesting contrast, the menu bar versus the popup menu. The menu
bar tells you "Here's all the things that you can do in this context" which
is comforting but at the same time confining, whereas you never know what
you can do using a popup alone.

Jim

----- Original Message -----
From: "Jerome Chan" <eviltofu at earthlink.net>
To: <squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org>
Sent: Wednesday, September 26, 2001 6:15 AM
Subject: Re: Zurgle Project Update


> on 25/09/2001 8:37 PM, Andreas Raab at Andreas.Raab at gmx.de wrote:
>
> > * Get rid of that menu bar!!! (or at least make it a pop-out thingy) It
was
> > truly amazing to me how the mere presence of the menu bar almost
immediately
> > took me out of the constructive feel of plain sheet of paper and back
into
> > the conservative WIMP style (perhaps that's intended?! ;-)
>
> The menubar is a morph so you should be able to get rid of easily if you
> dont like it! :P
>
> When I open new morphic projects, the menu bar doesn't appear in them
> either. So I guess this should be a bug report? :P
>
>
>
>





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