Re: My GWorkspace feature request

[Nicolas Roard]

On 2003-06-21 11:01:18 +0000 MJ Ray <markj+0111@cloaked.freeserve.co.uk> wrote:

> Nicolas Roard wrote:
> > But I don't see why contextual menus shouldn't exist for experienced users.
>
> Inconsistency, non-obviousness, violation of Once And Once Only,
> encouragement of user castes... or shall we give up and code the wheel
> group back into GNU too?  ;-)

According to you, if contextual menus are so hard to reach, they won't annoy users, as 
they won't even notice them... "encouragement of user castes" ? well I really 
don't see why you are against
a multi-level approach to the gui. In fact, that's already the case, for example
with keyboard accelerators. The rule is to not annoy unexperienced users, and 
of course, that everything
is doable in a straightforward way for them. But, if you have others methods, 
like accelerators, for more experienced users,
it's not *bad* !  contextual menus play in the same league.
One thing that you shouldn't forget, is that users starts possibly 
unexperienced.
But they don't always stay at the same level : many of them acquire experience.

For me the rule, is to ease the use of program for unexperienced users, with
clean and intuitive gui, but to not forget experienced users and provide them
an ergonomic gui, even if the input methods aren't exactly the same as for
unexperienced users.

For contextual menus, the idea is simply to regroup actions contextual to
an object, actions already existing elsewhere in the interface of a program.
It's just a shortpath, not something which not exists elsewhere.

--
Nicolas Roard