UI issues

Michael Latta lattam at mac.com
Fri Dec 24 19:52:11 UTC 2004


I have noticed a general UI styles in Squeak that I question.

1) The menu items in the system do not enable/disable based on context. 
  For example you can set a gradient fill on a morph that does not 
support gradient fills.  You can select "remove method" from a method 
list with no selection.

2) The menus are too tightly spaced, and in too small a font.  This can 
make selecting the proper choice much more difficult.  The Yes/No 
promps in particular create very small targets.  This may have been 
done to allow menus on very small screens, but should be adjusted on 
regular displays.  A padding between menu items would help a great deal 
in both usability and readability.

3) There are very long menus that require selecting "more..." to get 
the remaining selections.  Has anyone thought about hierarchical menus 
that would bring more choices closer to the mouse point and be easier 
to both use and habituate on?  In particular the use of circular menus 
would be more usable.

Michael




More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list