Re: Look & feel, future plans

[Peter Cooper]

> well esp. the issue with menus is a hot potatoe... I almost bet that you will
> not find many (ex-)NeXT users who like horizontal menus better than NeXT's 
> approach. I strongly believe that vertical menus are far superior and that
> Apple made a big mistake in dropping them, but this is just my opinion...:-)

There are some strong arguments for vertically-structured menus in the
NeXT style:

* not fixed to any specific location on the screen(s), which can mean
  significantly lower mousing time and is less tied to the full-screen
  application approach favoured by Apple in the old days (pre-multifinder)
  and Microsoft now

* vertical menus are *much* closer together (ie 20 pixels vs 100 or more,
  the difference between text height and text width of a menu item) 
  meaning that in a given period of time you can move your mouse over
  far more menu items to choose the necessary one

* your last menu can be still available (eg you selected Edit-Style-
  Bold, it's only a single menu click to get Italic subsequently) rather
  than full menu exploration that's required with most other approaches
  - this is oddly a little like the MS dynamic tool bar stuff ;)

Remember that the Apple approach is historically connected to 512x384
pixel displays, running only a single application at a time. The fact that
MS has a similar approach doesn't mean that there aren't better ways to
do it!

The OpenStep way of building UIs using IB means that bolting on themes is
not going to be super-easy, especially when UI objects change size or shape,
left-right orientation etc. Doing both kinds of menu is going to be a
headache unless someone has a really brilliant idea!

Regards

Peter