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By the way, I loved that movable "toolbar menu" design. It seems to have been forgotten in the move to "modern" but think it was the best one so far. You coul
by mixmastamyk 3y ago
By the way, I loved that movable "toolbar menu" design. It seems to have been forgotten in the move to "modern" but think it was the best one so far.
You could put it inline with other toolbars so it didn't waste vertical space. The full menu was very discoverable, like a table of contents for a featureful app. It could even be hidden completely if wanted.
None of the newer designs—obliterate in favor of titlebar buttons, or hamburger, are a such a great combo of power and friendliness. The traditional permanent menu is not very flexible.
- jwells89 3y agoToolbar customization (ability to modify their contents) was nice too. Firefox still has it (for now) and you still find the occasional Mac app that has the old native customizable toolbar intact but even those are becoming uncommon. The first place I saw both fixed toolbars and hamburger menus in desktop apps I think was probably in Chrome, which due to its popularity no doubt had a strong normalizing effect on both.
- xp84 3y agoSo true, that was once something you could count on from any mature application that had much of any UI to speak of. We took for granted that because it was a computer, of course almost everything can be customized. That was a lot of what was exciting about computers. Today everything (web, mobile app, desktop) is converging toward "One lazy UI, optimized for aesthetics, riddled with junk drawers ( ••• buttons) and static" -- except not really static since the whole UI is ripped and replaced every 18 months or so to capitalize on some trend or because a new "UX designer" came to power.
- mixmastamyk 3y ago^also Marketing Department.
- sph 3y agoAlso GTK 1.0, which let you pull out a toolbar into its own separate miniwindow. And IIRC you could also do that with menus.