[squeak-dev] NewWorldMenu

tim Rowledge tim at rowledge.org
Sun Jan 15 05:42:05 UTC 2023


I like the general approach but would prefer even more trimming - along with making more effective use of submenus as Stephen mentioned. This is sometihng I've had on my list for ... well, since before the asteroid strike that wiped out the dinosaurs. If possible I like menus to be around 7 entries. Nine at most.


I was imagining sometihng along the lines of 

Help
Browser
Workspace
open->
projects->
do->
save
save/quit->

... All implemented with our really quite nicely working submenus (see the dock 'Extras' menu for examples if you're not already familiar)  instead of the annoying "click on this to open a quite separate menu because we still haven't got around to fixing it" still seen to often. When implemented sufficiently efficiently that they appear perceptually instantly, even multi-level menus are very effective. In RISC OS menu trees can include small dialogues as well, which sounds weird but boy, it works really well. With the menu search/filtering we already have (and extended to deal with the submenus?) we could make a very fast UI facility. Oh, yes, one thing also still needed that should be copied from RISC OS is handling cases where a menu (yes, very inadvisably but still done by some people for what they thought were good reasons) is too long by adding a scrollbar when needed.


'open' would list all the tools/apps. Including one that provides all the changes related stuff currently scattered around. And one that provides all the appearance stuff (which should really be a pre-filtered preferences tool anyway) including themes and fonts and dpi mode and shadows and so forth. I would suggest that the 'list of windows' be a submenu of this.

'projects' would have all the project options and really ought to be the same on the dock menu.

'do' is already a pretty crufty grab-bag but I suspect it has a lot of thing people use so probably it should stay, though a pop-up help window seems like a nicer concept

'save/quit' should be a submenu with the 'anything other than a simple save' options.

There are a lot of other far-too-long menus as well. The code-editor menu is *thirty-two* items long! And there is a long secondary menu!

I'm sure we could make this all a lot nicer.

tim
--
tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Death is a nonmaskable interrupt. For now...




More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list