Michael Latta <lattam at mac.com> wrote:

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

Quite a lot of the UI in Squeak is really not terribly well handled. I
wish we had more suitable resource (time, experienced talent, etc)
available to iprove this area.

> 
> 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.
Greying out or otherwise incapacitating menu items is probably
something that could be done fairly simply from the menu point of view
but it involves quite a bit of work in each application to make use of
it. Even without such incapacitating it is possible to make a suitable
menu with innapropriate items left out when the menu button is pressed.
Not many apps seem to bother right now.

Jef Raskin is currently trying to convince people that you should
design systems that work without need of such greying out (etc) by
making sure that all options work (as in do something intelligable) at
all times. Nice idea but seems to me to be a really difficult thing to
achieve. Take a look for pages on The Humane Interface if you're
interested. 


> 
> 2) The menus are too tightly spaced, and in too small a font.
Ned pointed out that the font can be easily changed, and it would
probably be easy to alter the leading. Personally I like menu items
quite close though. What I don't like is having gaps in the selectable
areas - those regions between menu item texts where you aren't selecting
anything.


> 
> 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?
Hierarchical menus of shallow depth would indeed be an improvement in
many cases. Ought not be a terribly difficult thing to implement given
that we already have menus. Again, it's getting all the apps to make
use of them properly that would be the labour.

> In particular the use of circular menus
> would be more usable.
I'm pretty sure those are patent encumbered - oddly enough by a patent
gained by an old Smalltalk using company, Momenta. They were a putative
competitor to the Active Book and the PenPoint/Go machines back in the
89-91 timeframe. Momenta and Active Book were both Smalltalk systems!

And of course, menubars are the work of Dark Forces and should be
rejected completely.


tim
--
Tim Rowledge, tim at sumeru.stanford.edu, http://sumeru.stanford.edu/tim
Fractured Idiom:- POSH MORTEM - Death styles of the rich and famous