Re: scrollbars [was: Re: really attracting developers]

[phil taylor]

On Mon, 2006-09-04 at 12:26 +0100, Pete French wrote:
> > to scroll down without a scrollwheel and without the keyboard I've to
> > cross half of the screen to reach the scrollbar on the left side of the
> 

Can anyone (try to) explain the merits of the floating menus? I fail to
see any advantages over the more usual menus which are either attached
at some point to the application windows, or can be invoked by clicking
anywhere within the window.

The menus of multiple applications all look the same - only the title
bar of the base menu distinguishes them, so with lots of apps open it
gets harder and harder to locate which menu goes with which app.

For every app open you now have two windows (main app window and menu
window) open instead of one. So now you have two windows to position. Is
that an advantage?

I hardly see how anyone can believe that the dangling menu looks better.
I suppose it looks odd to me largely due to it being different to the
usual paradigm with which I am familiar, but even taking that into
account it is still rather odd.

As to the scrollbars being on the left, I have no basic objection to
that, except to say that it makes sense to have the scroll bars on the
same side as the close button, since those two operations happen most
frequently. You open the window, scroll the text to locate something,
then close it. If the close button is on the right and the scroll bar on
the left, then that would indicate extra mouse movements are required in
that situation.

Overall, to me the GNUstep (and by defenition Openstep) interface seems
to me odd for no good reason, as if it was dreamed up by marketing
executives who see the need to differentiate a product against its
competitors. I get the impression that GNUstep developers feel that if
the made the GUI behave and look similar to KDE or GNOME, people would
ignore the underlying architecture completely, and that their last hope
of convincing people to use (GNUstep) it will fade. At least if it looks
different people will think it IS different.

Perhaps I should now go book myself in with a good psychiatrist!

Phil T.