Re: GTK menu fixing...

[Nils Barth <nils_barth post harvard edu>]

Thus spake Sergio A. Kessler:
> Nils Barth <nils_barth@post.harvard.edu> el día Fri, 19 May 2000 00:45:27 
> -0400, escribió:
> 
> >Okay, here's my start at improving (sub)menus in GTK:
> >
> >Starting small, I decided to make it such that the arrow that
> >indicates a submenu now points in the direction that the menu will
> >appear, instead of always pointing right.
> >(I think that this minor usability triumph is a GTk first!)
> 
> it shouldn't be better if the arrow pointer doesn't change at all ?
> (like in windows)
> 
> how the mac do it ?
> 
> i find annoying that whenever I click (or focus) on something the 
> arrow pointer /always/ changes directions ...

Oops....sorry, I'm mixing words.
I'm not changing the mouse pointer arrow (yes, that is really
annoying).

What I'm changing is the submenu indicator arrow.
Say you click on your GFoot menu, and it's in the lower left corner, a
la Windows start. Then all the submenu arrows (right next to each menu
item with a submenu) point to the right, which is correct since the
submenus will appear to the right.
But what if your foot menu is in the lower right corner?
Then all the submenu arrows still point to the right, even though the
menus are going to pop up to the left!
This makes navigation hard, since you expect the menu to appear to the
right (that's the way the arrow's pointing, right?), but the menu is
on the left.
Experienced users learn to ignore the direction the arrow is pointing,
and just use it as an indicator that there IS a submenu.
Thus, the current setup is suboptimal -- you could have more
information in the same amount of space and in a more intuitive manner
if the submenu arrow points in the right direction, which is what this
patch does.

Agreed, changing the mouse arrow pointer to indicate this would be
really confusing.

For windows, the submenu arrow always points right.
(aaaahhhhhhhhhh! don't get me started on Windows menus!
 Start menu v. Menubar menus v. drop-down boxes (instead of popups) v.
 Office menus (woo-hoo, anti-trust people...))
On the Mac, I'm not sure -- they discourage multilevel submenus, and
didn't have context menus until lately (these being the main places
where you can get near the right side of the screen), and I haven't
tried it out.
This is less of a problem on Macs, since their menus are usually on
the top, near the left, so they don't run into the right side of the
screen much.
(But I suspect they always point right too, since Tog
http://www.asktog.com/
big Mac UI design guru, bitched out ``all'' GUIs (=Win9x & Mac OS 8+)
for having stupid submenu arrows)

If you'd like to try it out, I have a statically linked i386 (586?)
binary at:
http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~nbarth/submenus.gz
that you can test out the new submenus at.

Sorry I didn't make this clear earlier.

-- 
  -nils
Public key: http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~nbarth/pub-key.txt