Re: My GWorkspace feature request

[Eric Christopherson]

On Mon, Jun 23, 2003 at 05:48:38PM -0000, MJ Ray wrote:
> Philippe C.D Robert <philippe.robert@gmx.net> wrote:
> > I do not, at least not intentionally. Contextual menus are as much 
> > hidden as any other submenu of the app's menu.
> 
> How does one detach a context menu to make it continuously visible?  I
> do that often with submenus when I use them a lot.

Now that's a good idea. Context menus should be detachable. They couldn't be
transient then, though.

> > And it is definitely 
> > faster to point-click an object directly than to select it and move the 
> > mouse to the app's menu and find/select the submenu of choice.
> 
> Huh?  Surely you have to select it and then activate the menu, else it
> would break the concept of "targeted actions"...

A menu which is located 0 pixels away from the cursor is still closer than a
menu which is located n pixels away, where n is any nonzero integer. I
thought that was the reason transient menus were included in the first
place.

> 
> >> The object you point at, or the object you selected?  If you are going 
> >> to
> >> have context menus, you have to deal with things like that too and will
> >> probably always confuse people.
> > What is your point, the correct way of dealing with submenus is covered 
> > by the API specs. If this is done in a clean way then users will not be 
> > confused.
> 
> My point is that some context menu supporters seem to not want "targeted
> actions".  Instead, they want some sort of "action on object" which is
> not in the UIG at all.

Obviously for any of this to work would require some modifications to the
UIG. It would need to be decided whether context menus would work on the
*selected* object, or on the object under the mouse. On the selected object
(which I guess is what you mean by "targeted actions") seems more
consistent, IMHO.

> As do I, but, as the saying goes: "In God We Trust -- all others must
> bring data."  Trying to screw consistency by coding it into important
> apps and conducting a "UI change by stealth" should be resisted.  That
> way is the road to hell.

I've never heard the saying, nor do I understand its meaning. How is it
relevant?

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