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I thought we had moved on from Window's adaptive menus. Moving menu items around inhibits the user, you can work more quickly if you know where the item is goin

by sjf 17y ago

I thought we had moved on from Window's adaptive menus. Moving menu items around inhibits the user, you can work more quickly if you know where the item is going to be. That said, I love the way you can search menus, this is a feature that every toolkit should support. I don't know how long I've spent searching Gimp's erratically organised menus. I don't see how this is innovative though, he would want to have some very convincing results from his usability tests.

zephjc 17y ago
In OS X from 10.5 on, the Help menu has a quick search box (command-shift-/ aka command-?) that works somewhat like this. I find it most useful in programs like Photoshop which I don't use enough to memorize the menu layout, but enough to where I know approximately the name of the menu command I need.
thwarted 17y ago
You find Gimp's core menus erratically organized or the extension/plugin menus erratically organized? I've had issue with the more recent incarnations of the preferences window, but the core Edit, Layer, Image menus I've had no problem with. If you're often using a plugin, which have traditionally, for some reason, been sorted into menus based on the language they're written in (thankfully this has been getting attention in the 2.x releases, now a few years old), then I can definitely sympathize. Some filters and plugins might really be better if integrated into the core menus, but then you run into problems with a plugin seeming to override a core menu item (maybe this is desirable) producing a confusing interface for the user. In this regard, Gimp had taken a play from the likes of KPT, where all those cool filters were available as a separate (and guh, inconsistent) menu/UI to call them out as separate (although, in the case of KPT, it seemed to be more of a branding thing). I think a lot of the problems stem from the need for a consistent UI being incompatible with a tool that is infinitely extendable by the user via installable plugins. You end up with something like the Windows 95 Start menu, where all vendors were effectively encouraged to put things wherever they wanted in the hope that you'd find them the easiest and/or associate the application with their brand (all Adobe products being in the Adobe subfolder, for example).

by sjf 17y ago

zephjc 17y ago

In OS X from 10.5 on, the Help menu has a quick search box (command-shift-/ aka command-?) that works somewhat like this. I find it most useful in programs like Photoshop which I don't use enough to memorize the menu layout, but enough to where I know approximately the name of the menu command I need.

thwarted 17y ago

You find Gimp's core menus erratically organized or the extension/plugin menus erratically organized? I've had issue with the more recent incarnations of the preferences window, but the core Edit, Layer, Image menus I've had no problem with. If you're often using a plugin, which have traditionally, for some reason, been sorted into menus based on the language they're written in (thankfully this has been getting attention in the 2.x releases, now a few years old), then I can definitely sympathize. Some filters and plugins might really be better if integrated into the core menus, but then you run into problems with a plugin seeming to override a core menu item (maybe this is desirable) producing a confusing interface for the user. In this regard, Gimp had taken a play from the likes of KPT, where all those cool filters were available as a separate (and guh, inconsistent) menu/UI to call them out as separate (although, in the case of KPT, it seemed to be more of a branding thing). I think a lot of the problems stem from the need for a consistent UI being incompatible with a tool that is infinitely extendable by the user via installable plugins. You end up with something like the Windows 95 Start menu, where all vendors were effectively encouraged to put things wherever they wanted in the hope that you'd find them the easiest and/or associate the application with their brand (all Adobe products being in the Adobe subfolder, for example).