The World Menu (was Re: [ENH] add screen capture in TheWorldMenu)

stéphane ducasse ducasse at iam.unibe.ch
Wed Dec 29 20:44:50 UTC 2004


I agree. Someone should really clean all the menus.
I created my own for my book. I think that with services we should also 
be able to clean
the menu. Building a new map of the functionalities and proposing a new 
distribution
of the menu would make a lot of sense.

Stef

>
> On Tue, 28 Dec 2004 11:24:04 +0100, "stéphane ducasse"
> <ducasse at iam.unibe.ch> said:
>> ([ENH] add screen capture in TheWorldMenu)
>>
>> Stef
>
> This is good functionality to have somewhere in the menu system.
>
> However, I'm not sure we should be adding anything to the toplevel 
> World
> menu at this point.  The World menu is already pretty full of stuff (25
> items), and you can't even see it all on a PDA.  I think we may have to
> have a moratorium on adding anything new to the World menu, unless
> something else is removed or consolidated.  The screen capture items
> should go in a submenu (the question is which submenu).
>
> This topic comes up periodically:  "We really need to clean up/reduce
> the size of the World menu and clean up its submenus too".  But this is
> not really that easy to do, almost any change you make will potentially
> aggravate a lot of people... but perhaps we should try anyway. :)  We
> can wait for a usability expert to volunteer to take this on, but we'll
> probably be waiting a long time, and realistically it needs to be
> someone who is pretty familiar with Squeak.
>
> IMO there are only a few items in the World menu that are really 
> obvious
> candidates for removal/consolidation:
>
> "Print PS to File" - This one should go to a submenu.  It's useful but
> it is not toplevel-menu-status.  Of course, it should go wherever 
> Stef's
> screen capture menu items go, since it's almost the same thing. :)  Is
> there an obvious submenu for this sort of stuff?  "help"?  
> "appearance"?
>  Create a new "display" submenu?
>
> "objects" and "new morph..." - These both perform essentially the same
> function and should be consolidated somehow into a single menu item.
> Er, ah, how to do this.  The objects tool already has most of the
> functionality of the "new morph" menu, perhaps the few leftovers from
> the "new morph" menu (not already implemented by the objects tool) can
> be added as an extra menu button in the objects tool window.  Or,
> include only the "objects" menu and have a preference to replace it 
> with
> the "new morph" submenu, since most people probably just use one or the
> other.  (Although I'm reluctant to add a preference for every little UI
> menu difference, such as this.)
>
> "save as new version" - There are five save/quit related menu items
> which seems like a bit much.  "save as new version" is kind of useful,
> but "save as..." is really almost as fast.  Or perhaps a single "New
> Version" button could be added to the Save As dialog to achieve 
> (almost)
> the same effect.
>
> "playfield options" - This are EToy specific.  It would be nice if the
> "playfield options" menu only showed up if you already had a scripting
> area open.  (I haven't used these much, I assume "playfield" refers to 
> a
> "scripting area"?)  Also, I suppose both the "authoring tools" and
> "playfield options" menus would disappear if we were ever able to 
> unload
> EToys, so perhaps this isn't a big problem.
>
>
> OK, those are the "easy" ones, but there are still a few more which may
> be more problematic but are still worth pondering:
>
> "jump to project"/"save project on file..."/"load project from file..."
> - Personally I wouldn't mind getting rid of all of these, since they're
> covered in the "projects..." submenu.  Projects are important, but IMO
> no more important than regular windows (SystemWindows), and "find
> window" et al are handled in a submenu.  "previous project" probably
> deserves to stay in the World menu, though, since it is a pretty
> fundamental navigation aid.
>
> "flaps" - Eh, this submenu is pretty small and perhaps most of the 
> items
> could be consolidated into the "appearance" menu.
>
> "changes" - Hmmmm, *maybe* this could be consolidated into the "debug"
> and/or "open" menus, although perhaps it should stay as it is.
>
>
> All of the rest of them seem reasonbly essential to me.  Certainly some
> of the submenus themselves need some refactoring as well.
>
> Perhaps a certain subset of functionality could be moved to the smaller
> yellow-click/"personal"/"world" menu, to preserve the same quick 
> access.
>  Such as the project navigation, or perhaps the EToy stuff.
>
> - Doug
>
>




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