[squeak-dev] World menu versus docking bar

Casey Ransberger casey.obrien.r at gmail.com
Sun Mar 28 16:06:21 UTC 2010


Awhile ago we added a docking bar, because the world menu is often harder
for newcomers to find at first than we tend to want to think. We put some
key use cases there, most key of which is Help, which is probably more
important to newcomers than experienced users.

I noticed that the help... entry in the world menu contained some stuff that
was very questionably help-related, moved it out to the docking bar. I
pretty much emptied out the help... item on the world menu, so I removed but
Chris pointed out that not everyone uses the docking bar and put it right
back, suggesting that we find a way to generate the same menu in both
contexts (which I think is a great idea, and will investigate today.)

The question in my mind though, is: where do we stop with that? What do
people think: should there be any separation of concerns between the world
menu and the docking bar? (My thought was, some things made more sense on
the docking bar than the cluttered world menu, but if not everyone uses the
docking bar... yeah.) Or are the world menu and the docking bar best serving
the user as two different views into the exact same functionality?

>From an implementation perspective, I much prefer the canvas-ish style of
what's in the docking bar presently. The data-driven style of the world
menu, while very terse, makes my eyes glaze over. I'm tempted to rip into it
and and refactor it to use a canvas-ish API (making the two more
compatible,) but I'm liable to introduce regressions that way, and we're
fairly locked down at present, no?

Anyway, I was hoping to get a feel for what people think about this stuff.
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