Re: Fitts's Law, or do you _really_ know how to make a good UI?

[Michael ROGERS <M Rogers cs ucl ac uk>]

>Havoc Pennington <hp@redhat.com> wrote:
>> It could almost certainly be done, if someone sat down and did it.
>
>I was thinking about doing this, but it seemed to me that the best
>solution would be to have a menu applet, to which applications would
>pass their menu through CORBA. Then, as i learned more about CORBA, it
>looked like gnome_init would have to be replaced by gnome_corba_init in
>all gnome apps, and i didn't think that would go over too well.
>
>So, if you could give me some pointers on another way to do this (or
>approval of the CORBA method), i'll get started.

Could you do this with a WM hint which indicated that a window was a tearoff
menubar? This would allow WMs which were interested in providing Mac-style
menus to reparent the menubar window into a frame at the top of the screen,
and hopefully no apps (only toolkits) would need to be modified. Also, the
menu could be changed whenever a new app gained focus, with the WM working
out a way of handling focus-follows-pointer because it would be controlling
both the focus behaviour and the menu swapping behaviour.


Michael Rogers

Disclaimer: This suggestion in no way constitutes an offer to write the 
proposed code.