Popup Menu behaviour

[David Golden <david golden oceanfree net>]

Hi, 

I'm just asking about an annoying behaviour of
most GUIs that have popup menus, that really bothers
me when using applications requiring precision mousery,
like art* or cad packages.

*particularly the GIMP, where RMB popups can happen a lot !

Basically:

_Current Situation:_

When you press RMB, a popup-menu appears.  you move the mouse.
"""Moving the mouse causes the mouse pointer to move. 
You use this to select an entry from the menu.  Menu then disappears and your 
action is carried out.  
"""Mouse pointer is in a quite different position to where you left it before 
pressing RMB.

_Suggested Situation:_

When you press RMB, a popup-menu appears.  you move the mouse.
***Moving the mouse causes popup-menu to scroll underneath the (stationary 
relative to physical screen) mouse pointer.  The mouse pointer still _looks_
like it's moving, since it's entire background is shifting.  
You use this to select an entry from the menu.  Menu then disappears and your
action is carried out.
***Mouse pointer is exactly where you left it before pressing RMB.


This is probably not a new idea, but in this day and age of stupidly powerful
hardware, there's no technical reason such behaviour is impractical -
in fact, I've mocked up a demo of my suggestion in Java (1.3),  available
at http://www.iol.ie/~goldens/david/flymenu/
it's an 11K jar file, all nicely packaged to start with java -jar flymenu.jar
feel free to try it.  I find it feels surprisingly natural, and would make the
"losing my place due to using a popup menu" phenomenon a thing of the past...

The other possibility, simply warping the pointer back to where it started, 
also works, but feels/looks clunkier than holding the pointer and scrolling 
the menu underneath, IMO.


Dave Golden