Re: RE : Horizontal menus.

[Philippe C . D . Robert]

On Wednesday, May 28, 2003, at 02:14 PM, Nicolas Roard wrote:
> First, I'd like to say I prefer the vertical menus in general to the 
> horizontal, although I'm a former Atari user ;-)

Hehe ... me too :-)

> BUT, one of the great advantage of horizontal menu imho, is the fact 
> they take less
> screen space with a "small" (<=1024x768) screen resolution. And while 
> on a big
> screen I use vertical menus, on my ibook I'm now using exclusively the 
> horizontal menus.
> So I don't think Vertical or Horizontal menus are completerly opposite 
> things for
> an user, as I don't mind using both, depending on the context.

Here I do not agree. Due to the 4:3 screen ratio having anything on top 
or at the bottom makes the screen even smaller as most windows tend to 
be higher than wide. So even if the vertical menu seems to take more 
screen space it takes less of the important screen space away.

<snip>
> In my opinion, GNUstep should have ONE style of menu (the Vertical 
> one) and
> not both, because they are quite different. So the inclusion of 
> Horizontal menu as
> a gui bundle is better. What's missing perhaps is some config file 
> this bundle could
> load in apps bundles in order to not "guess" the layout in cases it's 
> not the best thing
> to do. And a simple preferences.app bundle to activate/deactivate the 
> bundle could
> be good ... but we should keep in mind the "official" menu style is 
> the Vertical one, and
> Horizontal menu are just a nice "plus" for people used to it.
> Supporting equally both would be a nightmare in useability, so we 
> should support only one, and as a somewhat NeXTSTEP will-be clone, 
> Vertical menu are more logical... (and they are far better with large 
> screen :-P)

Agreed :-)

Just my $0.02...

-Phil
--
Philippe C.D. Robert
http://www.nice.ch/~phip