Subject: Re: [linux-audio-dev] what's wrong with glame
From: Richard Dobson (RWD_AT_cableinet.co.uk)
Date: Fri Jul 27 2001 - 04:15:24 EEST
Inveterate Windows-avoiders may not know this, but Win2k does this for
the applications on the Start menu. This can carry a potentially huge
number of applications (I've seen examples where the full top-level menu
filled two columns); Windows gradually learns what the most-used
programs are, and presents a condensed menu with just those visible
(there is of course an arrow item to open up the full menu). It's a, um,
start - submenus are still submenus, and ~eventually~ the adept user
discovers there are ways of rearranging everything. But unless it occurs
to you that it might be reconfigurable (and there is no reason it should
unless someone, or the program tells you!), you will never think to hunt
the facility down.
The modern customisable toolbar is another attempt to provide this
functionality, but it still represents a chicken and egg situation to
the user.
So, yes, there is a real ~design~ job to be pursued here - a dynamically
reconfigurable menu, that learns from the user, but that still presents
a predictable enough structure so that things don't suddenly move to
unexpected places.
We are perhaps moving towards the era of the intelligent Agent, wher the
program answers Howto questions from the user, and reconfigures itself
according to the tasks the user most want to perform. Microsoft added a
'Answer Wizard' feature to Word (under the Help menu) where you type in
a sentence such as "How do I format into two columns?", and it will
parse the question and, with luck, take to to a suitable help message.
Richard Dobson
"STEFFL, ERIK *Internet* (SBCSI)" wrote:
>
> yes! instead of rigid menus or menus with last N open files etc. there
> should be a menu re-arranging functionality that changes parts of the menu
> so that the most often used functions are easy to access. For one-prupose
> application that's already done, sort of, by designing the menu according
> the common usage but for more complex apps that can be used in many ways
> (e.g. start/root menu in window manager) it would be really nice to have the
> menu changed according to your usage of the menu (since there is no good
> default).
>
> it should be able to remember how many times you use the menu items and
> have some sort of frgetting mechanism. I was thinking about implementing
> something like that for fvwm (in debian (almost) all X apps and lot of text
> mode apps have menu entries in pre-defined category so I was thinking about
> putting the most often used ones into top level menu...
>
> there an interesting user interface used for one of the midi apps, forgot
> the name, where you can rearrange all the menus, pin the menus or individual
> buttons to workarea etc... it might be interesting to have something like
> that in gnome or kde (qt, gtk) or other toolkits...
>
> erik
>
> --
-- Test your DAW with my Soundcard Attrition Page! http://www.bath.ac.uk/~masrwd (LU: 3rd July 2000) CDP: http://www.bath.ac.uk/~masjpf/CDP/CDP.htm (LU: 23rd February 2000)
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b28 : Fri Jul 27 2001 - 04:14:24 EEST