[haiku-development] Re: [Haiku-commits] r21394 - in haiku/trunk: headers/os/interface src/kits/interface

On 6/14/07, François Revol <revol@xxxxxxx> wrote:


In StyledEdit as well...
It merges the "Open" item and the "Open Recent" submenu you can find
for ex in Gobe.


ShowImage also has the merged Open menu. What is funny is on R5 at
least opening the submenu will crash ShowImage (for some reason I
haven't yet figured out), so I tend to use the shortcut to open images
;)

I'm trying to decide where I stand on these issues. For one thing we
can look to other operating systems and applications for insight into
how they do it, but that does not necessarily mean their way is
better.

A lot of people like to point at Mac OS X as some kind of paragon of
usability, but Apple frequently won't even follow their own UI
guidelines. Look at the disparity of UIs with brushed metal here,
candy buttons there, etc. Then when Apple codes for Windows they don't
follow any of the usual Windows UI standards, with the most recent
example being Safari for Windows. They don't even use ClearType for
their subpixel font rendering, they ported over the Mac version. Of
course some argue that all this was because they want Windows
developers to see exactly what their future iPhone apps will look
like. But to me that just means that marketing is more important to
them than usability.

So anyhow, to the point at hand: having an open menu that can be
activated by clicking or with a shortcut, but also contains a recently
opened submenu that will open after a short amount of hovering over
the menu item. I don't think it is that bad. In fact, I might argue it
is more usable that the separate Open and Open Recent menus. Let us
imagine a novice user who starts StyledEdit for the third time to open
the same item. They move the mouse over the Open menu to do the usual
searching for their item in the BFilePanel, but then, oh look, there
is the item they want in the recent items menu. So they just move
over, click, and it opens. Versus them taking the time to scan the
whole File menu, see there is an Open Recent menu, and then moving
over that to find their file.

Then what about the case where there has been quite a while since a
certain file has been opened and it has therefore scrolled off the
recent items. With the separate Open Recent menu the user would have
to move down to that menu item, open it, see that the file is not
there, then move back up to click open. With the combo menu they can
move down to Open, let the submenu open, see that the file is not
there, and then just click to get the BFilePanel. For both novices and
advanced users that is just better.

So I say we keep this, and just improve the menu drawing a bit to have
more space between the display of the shortcut and the submenu arrow.

Ryan

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