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List:       kde-look
Subject:    Re: On menus generally
From:       Marko Samastur <markos () elite ! org>
Date:       2000-03-30 22:43:16
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Hi,

Once for a change, I'll try to be very brief :)

Rik Hemsley wrote:
> 
> > Dynamic menus can be treated this way: the program tells the
> > menucontroller (kaction?) to create the according menu which will be
> > expanded with the dynamic items before shown.
> 
> Ok. That's quite a lot of configurability.
> Considering that about 0.1% of users will actually be bothered enough
> to change their menu and toolbars, perhaps we should just let them
> edit the XML as they can currently ?

I'd just like to add a warning about this obsessivness with
configurability. I think this is one of the problems with Windows
environment, which often gives you twelve ways of doing things, but none
good.

Often, extreme configurability is just a way out for a programmer to
spare him really thinking it through how the program is used. It puts
all the burden of designing a good interface on a user which should be
unacceptable. In general, people have no wish to mock with all this
stuff. You don't have to be an old user interface specialist to notice,
that most time people spend on changing (configuring) working
environment is on the appearance of programs (backgrounds, sounds...)
and NOT the intrinsic working of them.

However, I'm not against giving power users the possibility to transform
the program to what they want to. But I do think that it is more
important that program makes sense for most users right away. We should
also be very careful how configuration interfaces are implemented. Often
used features (like word wrap in editors) should be easily accessible,
but more advanced that can more deeply affect the way program behaves
shouldn't invite users to make a mistake. I'd advise against programming
a dialog for a program, which significantly changes behaviour of the
program or at least force some effort from user to get to it. In
general, I think xml is good enough way for power users to change the
user interface.

There are more important things needed to be done, than designing GUIs
for this 0.1% of users.
 
> Well, again, only 0.1% of users will use tearoff menus.
> I think they exist now in Qt, so you may see them appear in KDE in
> the future.

If tearoff menus are what I think they are, then you have them already.
I just dragged the menu outside of the window in konsole and korganizer
(admitedly in 1.1.2, but I don't expect this has been removed in 2.0).
But in general I don't find it very useful.

> > Think of fullfeatured programs like kword...
> 
> Yes, kword is one app where 'power users' will want to mess about
> with the menus. But then these power users can probably figure out
> how the XML relates to the GUI. I suppose there could be a menu /
> toolbar editor too. Note that there's already a toolbar editor
> in konqy.

I think if they can't figure XML out, then they have no business doing
that. Ok, this is probably too hard on them, but I'm against going too
easy too.

Marko

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