First impression of Vista

[ted leslie]

When i a was doing my Masters of Math at waterloo, 
i took a grad course in UI, from Bill Cowan, i wonder if he is still
there? you're there is see, name ring a bell? he was an excellent prof.
he is probably retired by now.

Anyways one of the things we did, is do UI tests, and count number of
feet the mouse moved over the source of a sessions. Popup menus at the
mouse point on the middle and right click was pretty popular (common
back then).

Now back in 1991, on  a SGI, our mind set at the time was, 1-2 apps,
actaully mostly one, and we'd measure mouse movement distances,etc.
more from the point of view of tool panels for a app.

I can see your point, but then I have been a dual head 3200x1200
desktop'r for some time and redundant (not sure that is even correct)
menus on each app, isnt so bad,
now with the cheaping on montiors, especially digital paper coming into
play in the next year or two, a 400$ 30"  2560x1440 5lbs monitor is
going to be relatively soon (its about 1800$ now and 20 lbs), so i would
argue the issue of desktop menu saving space will be right out the
window at that time, and with such a bigger desktop, you will get bitten
even harder with that Mac top menu way of doing things.
For a power user, the old original X way of a right or middle click for
menus is actually pretty efficient, but boring.

-tl

On Tue, 2007-02-06 at 13:29 -0500, Lennart Sorensen wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 06, 2007 at 12:49:32PM -0500, ted leslie wrote:
> > I don't know if it is a part of a plug in to beryl, but they have that 
> > Mac like bottom panel , animate/zoom thing.
> > 
> > I have a Mac igloo running 10.4, and I got it 1.5 years ago,
> > this was before compiz and fluendo,etc. So when it came to itunes
> > (and online music purchases, I did really think it was preferable to
> > linux)
> > But there are two things that I think are brain dead on a Mac,
> > 1) why is every apps tool bar on the very top of the screen,
> > I have been an apple user since about 1981, and certainly when i got my
> > first 128MB Mac, with only running a few apps, and a small screen,
> > having a common top pull down menu panel was OK.
> > Fast forward to this century, and people have 20-30 apps/windows open,
> > and i don't want to be going to the top of the screen for my menus all
> > the time.
> 
> Having the menus in a consistent place, where moving the mouse to the
> top of the screen (where amazingly it conviniently stops by itself)
> hits the menu is actually a very good idea for a user interface.
> Microsoft messed it up, after the Mac and the Amiga had already done it
> the better way.  Having the menu in one place also saves screen space,
> which there is never enough of.  Microsoft's new solution is to make
> the menus disappear until you hit alt or point to the right part of the
> window (wherever that is), which is probably a bad idea.  People don't
> use things they can't see or don't know where is.  The amiga was pretty
> clever in that the status bar was also the menu bar as soon as you hit
> the right mouse button (which is the button used for menus on the amiga).
> Most things since unfortunately have just done it the microsoft way.
> 
> --
> Len Sorensen
> --
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