Re: Look and Feel

[Quentin Mathé]

Le 15 févr. 05, à 12:23, Frederico Muñoz a écrit :

> On 2005-02-15 09:37:55 +0000 Markus Hitter <mah@jump-ing.de> wrote:
>
> > The big advantage, supported by research results, of a menu attached 
> > to a
> > screen edge is, you have to adjust your mouse movement in one 
> > direction only,
> > in the other direction the screen border is your guide.  Horizontal 
> > menus on
> > the top border reduce the required accuracy of mouse movement even 
> > further,
> > because the size of the menu normal to the required movement is 
> > typically
> > bigger.
> >
> > This is always an advantage but competes with the need of a possibly 
> > very
> > long mouse movement on large screens.
>
>
> Yes, I see the point, Fitz's Law and all that, but I'm assuming that 
> the vertical, floating menu is available on right click, wherever the 
> user has the pointer. This would make this kind of menu the simplest 
> to use because the mouse movement is reduced to the minimum, since the 
> menu appears under the current position.
>
> I can imagine that it's possible to have a horizontal menu and still 
> retain this behaviour, but IMHO it's more consistent to have it always 
> in the floating, vertical fashion, since it will look better when the 
> user detaches part of the submenus. But a compromise is certainly 
> possible.

In my opinion, the Mac horizontal menu bar usability is the best when 
the menus don't have too many items (no more than ~15) and avoid to use 
submenus as much as possible (because of the really restricted path to 
navigate between two hierarchical menus and the discontinuity induced 
in the mouse movement)… when the menu complexity increases the NeXT 
menu window usability is unmatched because it is support perfectly 
submenus (nested with 3 hierarchical levels to take an example) which 
are a real pain with other horizontal menus layout, and moreover this 
very good support of hierarchical menus permit avoid root menus too 
much crowded as you can see in Mac OS X applications.

Quentin.

--
Quentin Mathé
qmathe@club-internet.fr