On Thu, 15 Aug 2002, John Levon wrote: > On Thu, Aug 15, 2002 at 01:42:40PM +1000, Allan Rae wrote: > > > > Additionally, the monolithic images make a "my favourite symbols" > > > dynamic panel a lot harder to do. > > > > Not such a bad thing then even if you mean user-defined panel instead > > Right, that's what I'm talking about. Maybe arbitrary numbers of > "virtual" panels creatable via drag and drop. Of course there comes a cut > off point where people learn to type in the latex symbol (which will be > more prevalent when the tooltips tell em what to type) but it's still > useful. There's still some difficulties I'm pondering before an > implementation ...
Amipro had wonderful user-configurable toolbars. I'm not sure custom panels are really going to be that useful -- except as an interim solution until mutliple/rolling/custom toolbars are available -- as they'll be fiddly to setup and then require two clicks to select. A custom toolbar would only require 1 click and offer the possibility of keyboard bindings based on toolbar icon position (as an extension of binding some arbitrary key sequence to "self-insert ding123" for example). > > You're into "Good UI" John. So please reassure me that Microsoft's > > hidden menues are worse than "Bad UI". I'm talking about the default > > behaviour of Office products to leave most menu entries hidden under > > an extra button at the bottom of the menu. PITA when you want to find > > something they consider unpopular by default. > > Well I've never used Office but it *sounds* bad. I suppose the intention > was to reduce the complexity of the menus but it is morel likely to have > the effect of hiding the stuff altogether. What do these things look > like ? Do they have text attached ? The bottom of the menu has one of these "«" pointing downwards which you have to click to reveal the extra entries. In some cases it seems to expose only two or three extra entries and to make things worse these extra entries usually get entered somewhere within the existing drop-down not just tacked on the end. Fortunately there is a configuration option to disable this lame-brained idea... but you have to search to find it by clicking on a few of those "«". > Sounds very much like a wallpaper solution - "our menus are too complex > - let's hide stuff" when there are probably better solutions. > > Like removing about 90% of the features in word ;) Or getting someone like you or Rob to reorganise the menu order into something useful? But I suppose they have their baggage they have to carry around: word 2 had a X menu that included an entry for Y, so Y should always be under X even though we now have another menu Z that is more appropriate. Allan. (ARRae)
