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List:       kde-usability
Subject:    Re: Proposal for KDE 4
From:       Diego Moya <turingt () gmail ! com>
Date:       2005-09-27 17:46:04
Message-ID: 11ee0494050927104612d4a72e () mail ! gmail ! com
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On 27/09/05, Sébastien Laoût <slaout@linux62.org> wrote:
> Well, I just see that page:
> http://browserbookapp.sourceforge.net/topaz/
>
> That's a somewhat similar concept to the Create/Communicate menus.
> It's in thinking for GNOME 3.
>
> I like it too.

Taken from that Gnome link that you provide:
"""Documents are First Class Objects - As a user, I don't want to "Run
Firefox" or "Start Evolution". What I really want to do is browse the
web and write mail. My applications should be ego-less - my data is
the focus."""

The Documents vs Applications debate is a solved one in academic
research. The solution is a GUI very close to what the Unix CLI did
for system development - a universal "document" object ( the
equivalent of a Unix pipe), and universal "commands" applicable to
every object of the right class no matter the application in which
they're open. There is a MIT-like open sourced project implementing
this model:

http://haystack.lcs.mit.edu/

This project is like the Google News "Customize this page" feature
generalized to handle all kinds of data, plus universal access to
available commands through context menus.


Also the future Windows Vista shell will provide industrial-level
support for this interaction model + system architecture:

http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=114710



> They managed to not have a "Configure" menu but a "Manage" menu.
> The Manage menu is to manage the computer: close session, shutdown computer...

If everything is related to the computer, they really should call it
"Computer". There's no need to introduce a non-standard new term,
better stay with whatever the user already knows.

> and a sub-menu "Configure"
Unfolding sub-menus should go the way of the dodo. They are a
usability nightmare because they force the user to navigate the mouse
through a long horizontal 20-pixel-height tunnel, and failing to do
this ability trick will hide the target. Hidden sub-lists (like the
left ones in Evolution and Outlook) and pie menus are much better.

If you really need sub-menus, a good implementation is to open it
down-right near the cursor, just like a context menu, even if it
partially overlaps the parent menu (which is no longer needed).


> The question is, how much "main menus" are we ready to make?
> Open/Create/Communicate/Manage/BackgroundActivites
> That's enough, I think.

A very good question. Maybe there isn't a definite answer for this
one, but I feel that the right thing will not be to create a top-level
menu for every action possible  with a computer. A sensible approach
that I like is the one of Symphony OS: instead of creating top-level
verbs, it creates "places" containing related commands AND information
in categories which make sense to the user:

- User data (documents, video... including a search tool)
- System data & commands ("Computer", configuration, screen preferences...)
- Applications (tools)
- Archive/trash (old information)

- Applets (persistent information)
- Taskbar (open applications/files)

This categories are very similar to what Ubuntu did for Gnome as the
main level menus and toolbars. And the two solutions evolved
independently, so maybe they have arrived to something.

>
> Well... I advise you to read the page.
> We have "déjà vu" things but there are also good refinements and polishements
> to our model.

What I'm missing in these discussions is a better way to
explore/discover the available content and tools in an efficient way,
better than the Windows-95-old-style "start" menu. Haystack has
faceted navigation (think Price/Size/ categories in an online shop),
but this is only for collections of unstructured data - it doesn't
work that well to recover archived documents. Maybe something like the
OneFinger file browser (which filters out the items unrelated to your
current task) would do the trick:

http://onefinger.sourceforge.net/

Combined with the keyboard-friendly command-line-like interface of
tools like Quicksilver for Mac OS X:

http://quicksilver.blacktree.com/
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