Re: Of applications and documents

[David Adam Bordoley]

Pascal Bourguignon writes: 

> For example,  the first  step would probably  to remove the  menus, as
> they're known.  Each  object should have its own  pop-up menu, used to
> send them their  proper messages.  Users are not  ready to accept that
> it seems. 
>
> Smalltalk was close to that. Oberon too.

I disagree with this slightly. Well designed context menus are handy to more 
intermediate to advance users. However, numerous usability papers i've read 
have always shown that toplevel menus are far easier to use by most novice 
users and even more advance users, because they are more imediately 
discoverable. 

The key with toplevel menus is to reorganize them to be more document 
friendly. I'm a big fan of the macintosh single menubar design. One idea 
i've had floating around in my head is: 

New File Edit View Help 

The new menu would provide a very user visible way to create new documents. 
For instance choosing New -> Image would popup a dialog listing several 
image templates from which the user could choose to create the new image, or 
the user could choose to create an image from a custom template they create. 
This would for most applications replace the traditional File->New document 
menu. One exception would be File->New folder, since the new object is 
created inside of the currently viewed object. I think the difference is 
fairly self evident though. 

Beyond this I think it would be really good to incorporate searching and the 
internet more directly into the desktop ui (part of moving beyond the web 
browser). One idea i've seen is to actually add a text entry box to the top 
menubar in the upper right hand corner. Users could use this box to search 
for files on their local computer, open web pages, etc. 

dave