Menu-in-window & one-menu-windows

[Eric Dunbar]

[xposted to -sounder, follow-up where desired... this isn't unrelated
to Linux computing]

On Fri, 17 Dec 2004 11:49:58 +0000, David Marsh
<lists2005 at viewport.ukfsn.org> wrote:
> 
> Will Backman wrote in gmane.linux.ubuntu.user
>  about: Re: Applications in next Ubuntu
> 
> > While I also dislike the one button mouse, it was a well-researched
> > design decision by Apple.  Most users are confused by multiple mouse
> > buttons.
> 
> For beginners, this is probably true. But as you learn more you soon
> start to feel hampered by the restrictions that entails - having to hold
> down extra keys (bleh, bleh!) or flick up to the menubar when you want
> to use additional features.

There is one other _major_ design flaw which goes beyond the beginner
vs. power user dichotomy of right-/left-click and that is the menu
bar.

Regardless of experience, a single menu bar at the top of the screen
is the more efficient (a) way of selecting menu and (b) use of space
(important given that a lot of us are on laptops and more and more
users are switching to laptops, and these users are getting older and
older so their eyes won't be able to handle the tiny text size
required for high-res screens, and a 15" laptop is at the practical
upper end for most users size-wise).

Unlike multi-button mice, which can be useful for a sizeable number of
users, menu-in-window is a poor design because it makes selecting menu
items a non-intuitive process for the bulk of users.

With the menu being the top-most item on the screen people have one
fixed destination and no over-shooting is involved -- it's much easier
for the brain & muscles to learn to go to a fixed edge (i.e. screen
edge) than to a random, ever changing location. I see this _all_ the
time with Windows users at work -- they'll maximise a window _all_ the
time and get frustrated if the window isn't maximised. These are users
who don't benefit from that paradigm & amusingly, I've now converted a
number (after they saw me doing it) to working with IE and Word in
full screen mode (I always work IE on Win or FireFox on GNOME in
full-screen mode b/c it gets rid of all that wasted screen space).

What I find amusing/irritating about GNOME/KDE is that they're Windows
clones in appearance (as a Mac user that's one of the elements I don't
quite enjoy -- Windows' menu-in-window wasn't exactly a triumph in
ergonomic design). I'm a tad disappointed that there hasn't been more
experimentation with fixed-menu. It wouldn't be hard to implement,
would it? (I'm no software developer so I don't know how the APIs work
on Windos-GNOME-KDE) It would be quite easy to take a Mac app and have
the OS turn it into a menu-in-window app if the GUI designers wanted
to do so (because of the modular software design discipline forced on
Mac OS developers)... it's easy to port an app if you use the same
language so I don't see why the following wouldn't be a reality yet.

Would it be possible to design a GNOME/KDE uber-"theme"/x-windows
extension that would apply the one-menu-window paradigm discipline to
existing x-windows (GNOME/KDE) apps? Are there window managers out
there that do that yet?

Are there any window managers that extend either of the menu paradigms
and incorporate newer designs? I like elements of both and would like
to see something done with that. We haven't really seen movement on
either front in over 15 years!

Eric.