[GRLUG] Ubuntu Oneiric

[Don Ellis]

On Sat, Oct 29, 2011 at 10:20 PM, Mike Williams <knightperson at zuzax.com> wrote:

...

> However, I doubt that I'm ever going to agree with the designers
> that the menus should show up on the top of the screen regardless of where
> the active window is, and it's especially bad when they don't show up at all
> if the interface is in a bad mood. Said bad moods happen way too often.
> Having media player gadgets drop down from the speaker icon in the top bar
> is a decent idea, but when you click on them, they should be able to
> actually launch the program if it's not already up.

For the origin of having the menu at top of screen rather than top of
window, you can see Tog On Interface by Bruce Tognazzini, 1992. The
idea is that, since your logical workspace could be up to 32 feet tall
(maybe more now), you can slam the mouse to the top of the screen much
faster and with less precision needed than you can find the top of the
current window, especially with mouse acceleration. With MacOS 7.6, (I
think that's the correct version) you could do just about anything
with the keyboard and mostly ignore the mouse. Still, that part of the
interface design can be helpful when mousing.

Things not working, on the other hand, is not part of good interface design...
(and I occasionally see grating examples of poor interface design on
Apple products from people that were probably not around in the early
days (I had Apple training on mouse-based products in 1982))

--Don Ellis

-- 
This message has been scanned for viruses and
dangerous content by MailScanner, and is
believed to be clean.