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The Macintosh had most commands hidden in menus. The lucky thing was that there wasn't space for a lot of commands. The writer of this article would probably
by projektfu 7y ago
The Macintosh had most commands hidden in menus. The lucky thing was that there wasn't space for a lot of commands. The writer of this article would probably recommend toolbars, which were introduced much later, possibly by Microsoft in one of their Windows applications.
- PhasmaFelis 7y agoThe original 1984 Mac used toolbars in MacPaint and MacWrite, just that I can recall. I wouldn't be surprised if they dated back further to Xerox PARC's GUI research in the '70s.
- greggman2 7y agoHidden is an interesting way to descibe menus. The UX people at the time called that making all options visible since you could click on the menus and look at all the options. They also recommended the menus not remove options but just gray them out if they weren't available. This was in contrast to lots of software at the time which was all hot-key based such that the only way to know what options there were was to look in a paper manual.
- projektfu 7y agoOne of the motivations for toolbars (and the ribbon) is that there is a large group of users who never look inside any menu. Many users do not know about Undo. Many word processing users are unaware of things like tab stops, automatic indentation, line spacing, and styles. I have known an otherwise intelligent user who did not know that the shift key could be held down to get a capital letter - they used the caps lock key to get a capital and turned it back off after typing it. It's pretty amazing what is not obvious.