🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1514@devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV> des@jplpro.JPL.NASA.GOV (David Smyth) writes:
>
>top-of-screen menu bar is "modal" and modality is really evil and
>confusing.  One of Xerox's design tenets for good human interfaces
>is "No modes!" and a good tenet it is.

Modelessness is very important.  I don't think placing a menu bar at the top
of the screen creates a mode.  The mode comes from the fact that on the
Macintosh only 1 application at a time can have the input focus (which
includes both mouse and keyboard input).  The system takes advantage of the
mode to reuse the screen space by swapping menu bars.

Note that any system is going to have a mode related to the keyboard input.

>Why not attach the menu bar to the application window (the controlling
>window if there are lots of them).  Then there is no concept of modality
>to the menu bar, and things like network applications work too.

This tries to eliminate the modality by making all the menu titles visible
and available to be selected.  If any of the titles are hidden, then you are
back in a mode.

Putting the menu bar at the top of the screen has one advantage over a menu
bar in the window.  The user has much more leeway in hitting a menu title at
the top of the screen than one in the window, because if you can't overshoot
the top of the screen, but it is easy to overshoot the top of a window.
(Actually on a Mac II you could configure your screens so that the top of
the menu bar would not be the top of the total screen area.)

With the mouse acceleration built into the Macintosh, it doesn't require
much motion to move the mouse to the top of the screen and back again.

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		 Larry Rosenstein,  Object Specialist
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