Re: Arlo, a little QA comment regarding your interview withlinux.com

[Liam Quin <liam holoweb net>]

On Wed, Oct 25, 2000 at 03:38:27PM -0700, John Sullivan wrote:
> Menus are faster. Putting every possible command into a menu is not
> necessarily the best "design for efficiency" though, because not every
> command is equally important.

One thing we did at SoftQuad (and that was common on some older Macintosh
programs) was to have "Advanced" and "Short" menus, with "Short" being
the default, and a menu item to toggle.

This turned out to be a very popular feature.

Beginning and intermediate tusers would use the shorter menus, and
as they got more advanced would sometimes enable the extra items.

The choice of what item to put in which menu is very difficult, though.

User configurable menus were less popular, partly because you had to
spend time configuring them, and partly because it wasn't so easy
to switch between short (convenient day-to-day) and long (ocasional).

Lee

-- 
Liam Quin - Barefoot in Toronto - liam holoweb net - http://www.holoweb.net/
Ankh: irc.sorcery.net www.valinor.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org www.advogato.org
author, The Open Source XML Database Toolkit, Wiley, August 2000
Co-author, The XML Specification Guide, Wiley, 1999