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

["James M. Cape" <jcape jcinteractive com>]

Geoff Reedy wrote:
> 
> On Wed, Feb 02, 2000 at 07:58:25PM -0500, Damon McGraw <damon@watchland.org> said
> > How much of a change would it be to allow the menu bar location to be
> > configurable? I know that KDE does something along these lines, i.e.
> > allows the user to configure applications to use a Mac-style menubar.
> > Could Gnome?
> >
> 
> This will only work if all the applications the user uses are gnome/gtk.
> This won't do anything for apps using the athena widgets or motif or any
> other toolkit.  This would be very inconsistent, and people might blame gnome
> for it.

... Which is why it shouldn't be the default.

Please, lets not re-hash this issue *AGAIN*. The generally agreed upon
consensus is to have a Global Menubar Panel Applet which exists in a
panel which is set to have items flush with the screen edge, and is 24px
tall. A checkbox in gnomecc would be able to set that up/remove it.
Hooks for this should be written into gnome-libs.

If you want to have Athena and Motif apps behave, you would modify them
to do the same thing.

As for tearoff menubars, I personally think that when they are torn off
they should re-orient themselves vertically (i.e. like a normal menu
that has been torn off):


[************] <-- grippy
| File     > |
| Edit     > |
| View     > |
| Settings > |

... etc.

    Jim Cape
    http://www.jcinteractive.com

    "Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them
     pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened."
        -- Winston Churchill