Re: Plans for ahead

[Riccardo Mottola]

Hi,

Gregory Casamento wrote:
> > I absolutely want "our" menus, they are distinctive and useful and if I were
> > >to make a reference distribution, I'd want to retain that.
> They are OLD.   More important than their usefulness is what they
> invoke and that is they make people think that we are NeXTSTEP and
> OPENSTEP only.  Like it or not our old look is part of our problem.
> I'm sorry you don't like this fact, but it is based on tons of first
> hand observation over the last ten years.

I'm sorry you mix look and with interface design. Facts and factoids.

Actually, our menus are NEW, they are newer than in-window menus and  
one-menu-bar on the top which came from Mac and Motif/OS2/Windows. They 
have close parents and predecessors (e.g. SGI menus, Amiga menus) but 
NeXT made them consistent.

The interaction with our menus makes NeXT & GNUstep distinctive and as 
trying to port applications back and forth it allows for a unique 
interaction. It allows, for example to have very smooth document based 
applications which are impossible to achieve (as still the latest office 
suite of a big software company proves) with in-window menus.
It offers the same functionality as a top menu bar, but is more flexible 
and works well with big screens or multiple-screens. We do not need to 
invent things like "tearable menus" and even "palettes" are not strictly 
necessary.

Thus, playing the same song is of no good for anybody.

Riccardo