Re: Submenu navigation

[Philip Armstrong <phil kantaka co uk>]

On Wed, May 24, 2000 at 06:13:20PM -0400, Nils Barth wrote:
> Right! The ``triangle'' area is dynamically created.
> Kim has been working rather privately on submenu navigation at:
> http://www.kimmccall.com/navigation/

A random point, having looked a bit at this. Kim talks about 'stickiness'
of submenu appearance + discusses several heuristics for deciding whether
a user is interested in a submenu or not. One alternative to all this
complexity would be do drop the auto-raise of submenus altogether, and
only bring up a sub menu when

1) The user clicks on the menu option leading to the submenu.
2) The mouse pointer leaves the menu to the right (left) of a submenu
   item.

Um. I seem to be harking back to RISCOS again :) I'm fairly sure this was
the RISCOS behavior...
 
Anyway, this approach does have the advantage of simplicity, and it avoids
the overhead of continually raising and dropping submenus as the pointer
moves over the parent menu --- something which is actually quite a
resource hog on lower powered machines, especially when the submenus are
dynamically generated.

It would be nice if this sort of behavior could be user selectable.
Shall I hack up a patch?
 
> > While we are at it discussing improvements to GTK's menus, I have a couple
> > of other suggestions:
> > * Scrolling when the menu becomes too large.
> also a TODO item. Good point about how many items there are -- you can
> get lost in a big menu.
> Maybe something like the number of menuitems remaining in each
> direction should be drawn next to the arrows?
> Or little percentages?
 
sounds excellent.

Phil

-- 
nosig