Re: scrollbars [was: Re: really attracting developers]

[Yen-Ju Chen]

On 9/4/06, phil taylor <ptay1685@bigpond.net.au> wrote:
> On Mon, 2006-09-04 at 12:26 +0100, Pete French wrote:
> > > to scroll down without a scrollwheel and without the keyboard I've to
> > > cross half of the screen to reach the scrollbar on the left side of the
> >
>
> Can anyone (try to) explain the merits of the floating menus? I fail to
> see any advantages over the more usual menus which are either attached
> at some point to the application windows, or can be invoked by clicking
> anywhere within the window.
>
> The menus of multiple applications all look the same - only the title
> bar of the base menu distinguishes them, so with lots of apps open it
> gets harder and harder to locate which menu goes with which app.
>
> For every app open you now have two windows (main app window and menu
> window) open instead of one. So now you have two windows to position. Is
> that an advantage?
>
> I hardly see how anyone can believe that the dangling menu looks better.
> I suppose it looks odd to me largely due to it being different to the
> usual paradigm with which I am familiar, but even taking that into
> account it is still rather odd.

 The menu is auto-hiden. So even if you have a lot of GNUstep
applications running,
 only the focused one has menu displayed.
 Some people have preference to put their menus.
 On mac, menus are stuck on the top.
 If you  really like right-hand scrollbar, you can put the menu
 on the right side of your window, which may be more convenient to you.
 That's the advantage you are looking for.

> As to the scrollbars being on the left, I have no basic objection to
> that, except to say that it makes sense to have the scroll bars on the
> same side as the close button, since those two operations happen most
> frequently. You open the window, scroll the text to locate something,
> then close it. If the close button is on the right and the scroll bar on
> the left, then that would indicate extra mouse movements are required in
> that situation.

 How about scrolling the text to locate something and start to type ?
 With scrollbar on the left, your hand moves less to the position
 to start typing.

 Every UI design has a reason behind it.
 Please try to understand it first.

 Yen-Ju

> Overall, to me the GNUstep (and by defenition Openstep) interface seems
> to me odd for no good reason, as if it was dreamed up by marketing
> executives who see the need to differentiate a product against its
> competitors. I get the impression that GNUstep developers feel that if
> the made the GUI behave and look similar to KDE or GNOME, people would
> ignore the underlying architecture completely, and that their last hope
> of convincing people to use (GNUstep) it will fade. At least if it looks
> different people will think it IS different.
>
> Perhaps I should now go book myself in with a good psychiatrist!
>
> Phil T.
>
>
>
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