[UI] Squeak's Menus

[Matthew Fulmer]

On Wed, Sep 19, 2007 at 09:36:12PM -0400, Chris Muller wrote:
> My least favorite design choice about the menus is the instructional
> balloon help,
> 
>    "Enter text to narrow selection down to matching items."
> 
> Does anyone know why displaying this balloon only AFTER you've typed a
> character, and the menu has visually responded by
> 
>   1) graying out everything not matching
>   2) highlighting the first entry that does match
>   3) displaying the typed character at the bottom of the menu,
> increasing its height
> 
> that the balloon is then displayed?
> 
>   1) The above three visual cues make the balloon completely unnecessary
>   2) In fact, having it appear at the top distracts the users
> attention from the bottom, where the search string is being typed
>   3) it sometimes even covers parts of the screen containing useful information!
> 
> Wouldn't it make more sense to display the balloon BEFORE a character
> is typed?  Even better, how about not at all?  It doesn't seem like
> something that would be that important to a newbie, who will be so
> busy absorbing other information, and they'll stumble on it very soon
> anyway..

http://bugs.squeak.org/view.php?id=6689

-- 
Matthew Fulmer -- http://mtfulmer.wordpress.com/
Help improve Squeak Documentation: http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/808