On 17-05-2014, at 3:18 PM, Chris Muller <asqueaker at gmail.com> wrote:

>>>    Browser>>shiftedMessageListMenu: offers good stuff I depend on like "local senders...", but I can't figure out what on Mac OS X the vulcan death grip to raise it is…
>> 
>> shift-click seems to work on my iMac. Also available from the more… entry at the bottom of the basic menu.
>> 
>> I have to say that our menus generally are damnably poorly done.  Huge menus, some sub-menus, some ‘pseudo sub menus’, hidden menus… awful.
> 
> That's damnably poor critique.  Just useless slamming?  Maybe propose
> a specific improvement to a specific menu?

It’s never useless slamming to point out inconsistency and a problem with poor design. One doesn’t always have time to write up a full account of a problem but perhaps occasionally somebody else will agree and feel up to tackling an issue.

For example, I broadly agree with your suggestion to trim down the World menu. I’d add that it would work more consistently if the assorted ‘foo…’ entries were changed to be actual submenu entries. We do actually have some pretty good code in the system for making responsive submenus that handle context changes. It can be a bit more work to hookup menus so that they add/remove/grey-out/whatever certain entries under appropriate circumstances but it seemed to work quite well for the Scratch stuff I fixed up a month or two ago. I think the trick is to make sure you don’t do anything terribly complex as a test and slow down menu opening.

In the text/code menu (and I’d argue that there likely ought to be separate menus for text views and code related views - good grief, there was in ST-80) we have three entries for text style instead of a single entry for a style submenu (or dialogue?), seven relating to do-it/print-it, ‘show bytecodes’ & ‘copy html’, and then a secondary menu with a load of important and useful entries very strongly tied to code views. And then of course if you ctl-menu-click you get an entirely separate and complex morph menu.

We do good. We could do better.


tim
--
tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
How do I set my laser printer on stun?