On Thursday 05 June 2003 08:57 am, Daniel Vainsencher wrote:
> Those ideas sound cool.
>
> I would really like to see keyboard control of menus and other
> common morphs become more practical.

Me too.

> For menus, I think the most important thing is to figure out and
> solve the conflict between menus for PluggableTextMorphs, and
> proper focus control.
>
> Then keyboard menu functionality would be much more accessible, and
> any enhancements would be much stronger. I think the more... type
> menus will eventually need to go, since they prevent any general
> design solution to this problem. IIUC, this is what you're talking
> about?

Yes, I'd like to have a more general solution to the big menu problem 
that can work with screens of arbitrary size. The problem is that 
there isn't very good management of the menus. Some automatically add 
the "more.."; others don't. I'd like to see the menu management 
always be polite enough to wrap the menus somehow on shorter screens. 
One way to do this more nicely, I thought, was to initially display 
only the most commonly used items if there wasn't enough space (or 
maybe always). Then you could display the rest if desired (or maybe 
if you left it up for long enough) in a way that wouldn't obscure 
menu items.

> For example, adding an attachment to a Celeste mail from a
> directory that has lots of files is depressing - I now have to
> search through >10 page - more, more more... And keyboard control
> doesn't help, because it does operate on the whole list, just on
> the subset being displayed.

Well, using a long menu as a file selector is a problem without proper 
visualization and navigation.

> I think menus as constructed by applications should not know
> anything about size constraints to layout - they should simply
> reflect the logical structure of the options.

They do, generally (except that sometimes people use submenus). 
However, only one kind of menu is actually managed.

> Then the morphs can do whatever tricks are useful.
>
> Daniel
>
> Ned Konz <ned at bike-nomad.com> wrote:
> > On Thursday 05 June 2003 03:18 am, danielv at netvision.net.il wrote:
> > > This change is interesting, it does the job in a very
> > > unorthodox way.
> > >
> > > I haven't made up my mind yet if I like it. What do others
> > > think?
> >
> > I'm not sure about it myself.
> >
> > I think it could be done better. I've started to play with
> > something that condenses menus based on "most used" statistics
> > (kind of like the new Windows does), as well as thinking about
> > using the keyboard filtering to actually shorten the menus even
> > though they may have continuations.
> >
> > --
> > Ned Konz
> > http://bike-nomad.com
> > GPG key ID: BEEA7EFE

-- 
Ned Konz
http://bike-nomad.com
GPG key ID: BEEA7EFE